in reply to Reading particular line which repeats itself many times in text

I don't know whether there is a fancy regular expression for this but in case where there are blocks I always use split (I consider it safer). 
my @begin_blocks=split /BEGIN $name/,$string_containing_blocks;

my $block=$begin_blocks[1];

$block=~s/END\s*$//;

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If there is no match '' is returned (since @begin_blocks now has only the zero index element: the string itself). This won't work if BEGIN blocks can contain the string 'BEGIN' inside them. If this is necessary you can use an escape sequence: replace all 'BEGIN'-s inside the block with 'BEGIN_'. If such a coding is used the search looks like this (add one line for decoding BEGIN_): 
my @begin_blocks=split /BEGIN $name/,$string_containing_blocks;

my $block=$begin_blocks[1];

$block=~s/END\s*$//;

$block=~s/BEGIN_/BEGIN/g;

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Re^2: Reading particular line which repeats itself many times in text
by uday_sagar (Scribe) on Jan 31, 2012 at 04:35 UTC

    Monks, Thanks for your replies. I have solved the problem by putting together the concepts of non greedy quantifier(?) and storing the whole file (using File::Slurp) in a scalar variable. Here is the code.

    use File::Slurp;
local $/ = undef;
open FILE, "my_text.txt" or die "Couldn't open file: $!";
binmode FILE;
$string = <FILE>;
close FILE;

if ($string=~/BEGIN hi(.*?)END/s)
{
print ${1}."\n";
}

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