I recently needed to parse the first few lines of some fairly large files. During my research in trying to figure out how to read just a few lines from a file, then move on to the next file, I found Jumping out of a partially read file.

This node solve my quest for how to read just a few lines from each file. However it left me with a different question. While I'm very accustomed to opening a file and processing it line by line, I've never done this with a scalar variable (ref: $header in Jumping out of a partially read file.

I'm fairly sure the answer is simple, however in many searches on Perlmonks.org as well as Google, and of course "Learning Perl", the solution has not yet become clear.

My $header scalar contains data that looks like this: 


X-Account-Key: account3
Return-Path: <>
Delivered-To: somename@somedomain.com
Received: (qmail 77369 invoked for bounce); 3 Jun 2005 06:35:09 -0000
Date: 3 Jun 2005 06:35:09 -0000
From: MAILER-DAEMON@smtp.somedomain.com
To: somename@somedomain.com
Subject: failure notice

[download]
Thanks for any suggestions,
Mike

In reply to How to parse a scalar variable by cajun

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