Hi everyone,

I am very, very new to Perl and programming, but have been asked by my company to learn the basics (by myself, with no texts!) to help in my job.

I am trying to pluck out all the lines containing a certain word from a large text file and copy them to a new text file.
I have succeeded in doing so, but I have realized that I need to also pluck out the line PREVIOUS to the each of the ones I have already been able to grab.

Here is the code I used to grab all the lines containing "adj : "

open(FILE, "<WordNet.txt");
my @array = <FILE>;
close(FILE);
open(FILE, ">>WordNetTest2.txt");
my @array2 = <FILE>;
print "Extracting adjectives\n";
foreach $_ (@array) {
         @array2 = grep {$_ =~ "adj : "} (@array);
                  print FILE "@array2";
                  close(FILE);
exit;
}

[download]

Here is a sample of what the lines look like from the text file:
-----------------
Fast
adj : quick, speedy
-----------------
I've grabbed all the "adj : " lines, but the others have eluded me!
Would there happen to be anyone who could instruct me on how to take out the previous lines along with all lines containing "adj : "?

Thank you very much in advance for any help.

-Brad

In reply to Using grep to pick out lines in a text file by Bunta

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