Moritz: (and others) Thanks for your advice. As for reading the new "clean" file in by blocks (as that is what I think you are suggesting), that would be great. The "cleaning" of the first file puts the "END-OF-DOCUMENT" record divider at the end of each record, whereas "h4>Award\s\#\d+<\/h4" is the start of the record, so it should work. But I am a bit confused (my Perl skills are not up to par). Do I need to modify other parts of the document? By just adding  local $/ = 'END-OF-DOCUMENT', the program no longer parses the data from the records. Should it still be using the new clean document with <IN>, but now only reading a record at a time, as such:

open(OUT, ">/Users/micwood/Desktop/output.txt");
while (<>) {
    s/\r//g;
    s/\t//g;    
    s/(<h4>Award\s\#\d+<\/h4>)/\nEND-OF-DOCUMENT\n$1/g;
    s/(<!-- \/noindex --><\/font>)/\nEND-OF-DOCUMENT\n$1/g;
print OUT "$_";}
close OUT;

my $novalue = '.';               # temp value
my $temp = '.';               # temp value
my $awardhashref= ();

open (IN, "/Users/micwood/Desktop/output.txt");
open(OUT2, ">/Users/micwood/Desktop/output2.csv");

my $allDocs = do
   {
       local $/ = 'END-OF-DOCUMENT';
       <IN>;
   };

my $rxExtractDoc = qr
   {(?xms)
           (<h4>Award\s\#(\d+)<\/h4>(.*?)END-OF-DOCUMENT)           
   };

while ($allDocs =~ m{$rxExtractDoc}g )
{
    my %award = (); # award hash
    
    $award{'entireaward'}= $1;
    $award{'A_awardno'}= $2;
    $award{'entireaward'}=~ s/\n//g;
      if ($award{'entireaward'} =~ m{Dollars Obligated<\/td><td align=
+right>\$([^<]+?)<\/font>}gi){
        $award{'B_dollob'} = $1};
[download]

etc, etc Which is fine, as long as it doesn't read the entire new "clean" file as once since I don't think memory could handle that. But if all I need to do is add  local $/ = 'END-OF-DOCUMENT', any clue why it no longer works? Thanks again, and I hope my questions are too simple (just not very good at this).