in reply to deleting a field in a flat-file

Given:
Aero Research Labs.###FundingOrg[###Date______[ Dec 1963 Aero Research Labs.###FundingOrg[ BBC###Date______[ Dec
if you want to delete everything starting with "###FundingOrg[" and ending with everything up to but not including the following "###", the following will do the trick:

while(<DATA>) { chomp($_); $_ =~ s/###FundingOrg\[.*?(?=###)//; print $_ . "\n"; } __DATA__ Aero Research Labs.###FundingOrg[###Date______[ Dec 1963 Aero Research Labs.###FundingOrg[ BBC###Date______[ Dec
output:
Aero Research Labs.###Date______[ Dec 1963 Aero Research Labs.###Date______[ Dec
hope this helps,
davidj