in reply to Text Extraction

Presumably, that ^Z is actually a Control-Z character, i.e. ASCII character 26, which was used in DOS (and in CP/M) as the end-of-file marker. It is no longer necessary but is ignored by Windows and Perl (unless you have turned on binmode for the stream).

The following is a succinct solution which is specific to your input data format. If the format changes, you'd probably have to tweak this somewhat.

I show how to extract just the values in each record, as you asked; but I also show how to extract the values along with the field names, in case that is useful. (I would think it would be, ordinarily.) 

use strict;
use warnings;

$/ = ''; # paragraph mode

while (<DATA>)
{
    next if /^\s/; # the header
    chomp;
    my @just_the_values = /^[^.]*\.* {1,2}(.*)/mg;
    my %keys_and_values = /^([^.]*)\.* {1,2}(.*)/mg;
    print "'$_'\n" for @just_the_values;
    print "$_ = '$keys_and_values{$_}'\n" for sort keys %keys_and_valu
+es;
    print "----------------\n";
}


__DATA__
                   NEW VEHICLE INVENTORY prepared by ANYUSER
                    04:15:00pm  21 Jul 2009  -  PAGE #    2


STOCK NO........... G0034203
YR................. 10
CARLINE............ ACADIA
SERIAL#............ 1GKLRKEDXAJ102450
COLOR DESCRIPTIONS. /
LST PRICE..........  36010.00
SALES CST..........  36010.00
DAY................  20
SC.................  1

STOCK NO........... G0034204
YR................. 10
CARLINE............ ACADIA
SERIAL#............ 1GKLRKED1AJ101543
COLOR DESCRIPTIONS. /
LST PRICE..........  33615.00
SALES CST..........  33615.00
DAY................  20
SC.................  1

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Between the mind which plans and the hands which build, there must be a mediator... and this mediator must be the heart.

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Re^2: Text Extraction
by sonicscott9041 (Novice) on Jul 22, 2009 at 20:22 UTC
    Here is the entire data file: / snip / See updated data below.
[reply]

      I've stored your data in a file called 782426.txt, because I couldn't get DATA to work with embedded Ctrl-Z characters.

      Now, in the below solution, I read the data a line at a time, building up a record until I encounter the line which I know, a priori, to be the last one in each record. I could have tried to exploit the blank line which occurs between records, but in dealing with the header, I rather crudely blow away all blank lines. 

      use strict;
use warnings;

open F, '<', '782426.txt' or die;
$/="\r\n";
binmode F;

my $last_key;
my $record = {};
my @records;
while (<F>)
{
    s/^//; # kill that pesky thing.
    /^\s+NEW CAR INV prepared by / and scalar(<F>), next; # the header
    /^[\.\s]*$/ and next; # skip any blank lines
    /^\d+ records listed\./ and last; # end of report
    chomp;
    my($key,$val) = /^(.{19}) +(.*)/;
    if ($key=~/\S/)
    {
        $key =~ s/\.+$//; # kill trailing dots
        $record->{ $last_key=$key } = $val;
    }
    elsif(defined $last_key)
    {
        $record->{$last_key} .= $val;
    }
    if ( $key eq 'SALES CST' ) # last line of record
    {
        push @records, $record;
        $record = {};
    }
}

close F;

for my $record ( @records )
{
    print "$_='$record->{$_}'\n" for sort keys %$record;
    print "\n";
}

      [download]

      I didn't bother trying to deal with that line at the top of your data which contains a lone '1' character.

      Between the mind which plans and the hands which build, there must be a mediator... and this mediator must be the heart.
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