in reply to Reducing a line read into $_

You might want to take a look at Lingua::EN::Squeeze.

Alternatively, I would suggest coding up a hash mapping regex patterns (to recognize error messages in the file) to your own message codes (to save space and display only the information you need, e.g., a priority and a problem class).

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com