hi to you all

i need some help with this one. i have a file that needs to be searched through several times. and this file is actually a set of some multiline records that are separated with >#W# marking. so my idea was to first regularly sweep through the whole file (because i need to do that to identify some parts of those records interesting to me) but once i did it i can create a smaller file with those indicative records associated with a record id (because every time i identify the >#W# i'll give an id too that record). why am i trying to do this when there is a perfectly good SQLite db engine which is created for this purpose and which i use frequently. well the reason is i was asked to do that bypassing the db engine of any sort. and since the speed was an issue (whatever) i figured i could speed up my searches by identifying record separators. then if i knew in which record is my interesting thing i could just iterate to that record and deal with it.because if i loop through a file by distinct record separator>#W# i am faster as it can be seen from the benchmark:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw(:all) ;

    my $x = $ARGV[0];
    my $r = timethese( 5, {
        a => sub{
        open (BOUT, "<", $x) ||  die "Ther were some problems with ope
+ning BLAST output : $!";
        $/ = ">#W#";   
        my $count = 0 ;
        while(<BOUT>){ 
        $count++ if (m/>/g)  ;
        }              
        $/="\n";
        close BOUT;
        #print "$count \n";
        },
        b => sub{
        open (BOUT, "<", $x) ||  die "Ther were some problems with ope
+ning BLAST output : $!";
        my $count = 0 ; 
        while(<BOUT>){  
        $count++ if (m/>/g);       
        }               
        close BOUT;
        #print "$count \n";
        
        
        },
    } );
    cmpthese $r;


Benchmark: timing 5 iterations of a, b...
         a: 43 wallclock secs (23.06 usr +  1.86 sys = 24.92 CPU) @  0
+.20/s (n=5)
         b: 169 wallclock secs (160.39 usr +  1.34 sys = 161.74 CPU) @
+  0.03/s (n=5)
  s/iter    b    a
b   32.3   -- -85%
a   4.98 549%   --
[download]

so now the problem is: 1. does anyone has a better suggestion on how to do the whole thing 2. how to deal with a record once i found it, because this record is then to be searched line by line so i would have to switch from $/=">#W#"; to $/="\n";and then do something like:

$/ = ">#W#";   
        my $count = 0 ;
        while(<BOUT>){ 
        $count++ if (m/>/g)  ;
        
        $/="\n";

          while(){}
        $/=">#W#";


        }              
        $/="\n";
[download]

but ofcourse this doesn't work , how to make it work?

thnx