in reply to How to loop over multiple datasets (blocks of text)?

The simplest change is to wrap what you have in another while loop that reads the datafile in paragraph mode, and then open each multi-line dataset as an in-memory file.

That way your existing code can operate directly on that ramfile without change:

#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use 5.010; $/ = ''; ## paragraph mode while( my $dataset = <DATA> ) { ## open each dataset as a ramfile open DATASET, '<', \$dataset or die $!; local $/ = "\n"; ## Return readline to by-line mode my $counter = 0; my $total_aligned_reads = 0; my $mtDNA; while (<DATASET>) { ## my $line = $_; #### Unnecessary; see next comment next if /Data_Set_\d+: /; next if /^NoCoordinateCount/; next if /^$/; my($chr, $lenLabel, $lengNumbers, $AlignedLabel, $alignedNumbe +rs) = split /\s/; ####, $line; split operates on $_ by default $total_aligned_reads += $alignedNumbers; $mtDNA = $alignedNumbers if $chr eq "chrM"; } say "total aligned reads = $total_aligned_reads"; say "mtDNA = $mtDNA"; say "mtDNA percentage = ", $mtDNA/$total_aligned_reads*100; } __DATA__ ...sample data as above ...

Produces:

C:\test>junk total aligned reads = 14253 mtDNA = 2650 mtDNA percentage = 18.5925770013331 total aligned reads = 906 mtDNA = 1 mtDNA percentage = 0.11037527593819 total aligned reads = 538773 mtDNA = 169 mtDNA percentage = 0.0313675703867863

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