My apologies for the formatting, first post. Yes, I thought I needed to parse those "groups" together into a line and was having difficulty with the multi line title lines. I had never considered that parsing was not necessary for an email. How would perl do that with the data I provided?

Yes, I thought I needed to parse those "groups" together into a line

That doesn't make much sense. Parsing is the opposite of putting things together into a line.

Given the lack of direction, I'll just create an array of records using a single line lookahead.

my $line = <$fh>;

# Skip first line
die if !defined($line);
$line = <$fh>;

# Skip second line
die if !defined($line);
$line = <$fh>;

while (defined($line) && $line !~ /^© Copyright/) {
   chomp( my $date1 = $line );
   $line = <$fh>;

   die if !defined($line);
   chomp( my $date2 = $line );
   $line = <$fh>;

   die if !defined($line);
   my $body = $line;
   $line = <$fh>;

   my $body = '';
   while (  defined($line) 
         && $line !~ /^\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{4}$/
         && $line !~ /^© Copyright/
   ) {
      $body .= $line;
      $line = <$fh>;
   }
   chomp( $body );

   my ($order) =~ $body =~ s/\n(.{7})\z//
      or die;

   push @recs, [ $date1, $date2, $body, $order ];
}

# Skip copyright line
die if !defined($line);
$line = <$fh>;

# Skip another line
die if !defined($line);
$line = <$fh>;

die if defined($line);
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