It is difficult to know what you intend from your code without sight of the data but as a general answer, if you use parentheses in the split regular expression to capture what you split on, it will be preserved in the resultant list or array.

$ perl -le '
> $str = q{abcDEfghIjkLmn};
> @arr = split m{([A-Z]+)}, $str;
> print for @arr;'
abc
DE
fgh
I
jk
L
mn
$
[download]

I hope this is helpful.

The source file has a \n at the end of the last line of each section, plus another \n to create the blank line. I wish the content of the array to be identical. I have read much about parentheses to preserve the delimiter, but have not been able to get that to work with the blank line delimiter. All help much appreciated...

This may do what you want. It uses a positive look-behind assertion so that the pattern splits on multiple newlines as long as thet are preceded by a newline. There ia also a look behind to cope with bank lines at the start of your data in case you need that. If you do, there will be an empty record at the start of your array that you can shift away.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $startOffset = tell DATA;
my $recordCt;

my @records = do
   {
       local $/;
       split m{(?x) (?: (?<=\A) | (?<=\n) ) (\n+) }, <DATA>;
   };

$recordCt = 0;
print qq{@{ [ sprintf qq{\n%2d >}, ++ $recordCt ] }$_<} for @records;

__END__
Record 1 consists of
three lines
of data terminated by a newline

Record 2 has
just two lines terminated by a newline

Record 3 contains four lines
of data which
is very important
to the project, newline terminated again


Record 4 was preceded by two blank lines
and has two lines terminated by a newline
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The output.

 1 >Record 1 consists of
three lines
of data terminated by a newline
<
 2 >
<
 3 >Record 2 has
just two lines terminated by a newline
<
 4 >
<
 5 >Record 3 contains four lines
of data which
is very important
to the project, newline terminated again
<
 6 >

<
 7 >Record 4 was preceded by two blank lines
and has two lines terminated by a newline
<
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Note that records 2, 4 and 6 are the newlines we preserved with the regex captures and each record finishes with a newline as you can see from the positions of the '<'s.

I hope this is helpful.

Cheers,

JohnGG

Please use code tags. See Markup in the Monastery for details.

How do you want to treat the blank lines?

Maybe you need to read blockwise?

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
use strict;
use warnings;

{
    local $/ = "";

    my @blocks = <DATA>;

    local $, = "\n";
    print map { ">>>$_<<<" } @blocks;
}

__DATA__
AB
A
BB





CC
C
CD



EE
EA
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Maybe you want to capture the split pattern?

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
use strict;
use warnings;

my $content = do { local $/; <DATA> };
my @blocks = split /(\n\n+)/, $content;

{
    local $, = "\n";
    print map { ">>>$_<<<" } @blocks;
}

__DATA__
AB
A
BB





CC
C
CD



EE
EA
[download]

If I understand you correctly, I think what you want is the following:

@finfo=split(/(\n{2,})/, <IFILE>);   #<+++++
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From split:

If the PATTERN contains parentheses, additional list elements are created from each matching substring in the delimiter.

    split(/([,-])/, "1-10,20", 3);
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produces the list value

    (1, '-', 10, ',', 20)
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