Success!!! I played around with it a bit and found another record separator so I didn't have to rely on my created one in the "cleaning" (ie, the "END-OF-DOCUMENT") and then relocated the other "cleaning" commands in that first part of the script to the block read into the memory. And just if you are curious it now looks as such:

open(OUT, ">/Users/micwood/Desktop/output.csv");

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

my $allDocs = do
   {
       local $/ = '<\/table>\n<hr>\n<br>';
       <>;
   };

my $rxExtractDoc = qr
   {(?xms)
           (<h4>Award\s\#(\d+)<\/h4>(.*?)<\/table>\n<hr>\n<br>)  
   };

while ($allDocs =~ m{$rxExtractDoc}g )
{

    my %award = (); # award hash
    
    $award{'entireaward'}= $1;
    $award{'A_awardno'}= $2;
    $award{'entireaward'}=~ s/\n//g;
    $award{'entireaward'}=~ s/\t//g;
    $award{'entireaward'}=~ s/\r//g;
  
      if ($award{'entireaward'} =~ m{Dollars Obligated<\/td><td align=
+right>\$([^<]+?)<\/font>}gi){
        $award{'B_dollob'} = $1};
[download]

etc, etc, And it works! Thanks, again. Best, Michael