File slurping into $text and then accessing a specific line?

legend has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

thundergnat of this forum gave me an interesting program that looks like this:

use warnings;
use strict;

$/ = "_END=======\n";

while (<DATA>) {
    s/========KEYWORD.+\n//g;
    print '-' x 80, $_, '-' x 80;
    $text = $_;
}
[download]

I was wondering if it is possible to access a particular line in the $text variable. I mean, once it has grabbed a chunk of data, I want to print a specific line from that. Is that possible by any chance?

Comment on File slurping into $text and then accessing a specific line? Download Code

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Re: File slurping into $text and then accessing a specific line? by Narveson (Chaplain) on Feb 26, 2008 at 22:40 UTC
Yes, it is possible. But why are you slurping into `$text`? Slurping is recommended only if the presence of multiple lines of data in a single scalar somehow makes your task easier. Usually this is not the case. Far from showing us why you needed to slurp, you are asking how to access a particular line. `use warnings; use strict; my $PARTICULAR_LINE; # regex print '-' x 80; while (<DATA>) { s/========KEYWORD.+\n//; print; if ( /$PARTICULAR_LINE/ ) { access($_) } } print '-' x 80; __DATA__` [download] This does the same printing job as the code you posted, and it accesses the particular line.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: File slurping into $text and then accessing a specific line? by hipowls (Curate) on Feb 26, 2008 at 22:16 UTC
Depending on how you decide on the particular line. There is `my $line = ( split "\n", $_ )[$wanted_line];` [download] which splits $_ into a list and selects a line by number or `my ($line) = /^(.?PATTERN.?)$/ms;` [download] which will pick a line on what PATTERN it conatins.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: File slurping into $text and then accessing a specific line? by Prof Vince (Friar) on Feb 27, 2008 at 09:16 UTC
If you want to access a line by its number, you might be interested in using Tie::File.	[reply]