Question

I need to read in multi-line records and trim them down to exactly 40 lines. Then
pad them to be 45 lines. They might be as large as 70 + lines. These records need
to end up being 45 lines.

The record separator is a line beginning with the pattern /^#matchee/.

I’m assuming you’d set $/ to #matchee.

{
    $/ = "#matchee";

    while (<>) {
        # I need to print first 40
        # lines of each record then
        # pad to 45 with delimiter as
        # last line.
    }
}

Sample record

REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT
Anonymous Ave

Item 1
Item 2



<bunch of blank lines>
#matchee

Answer 1

Here’s my solution…

#! /usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

{
    $/ = "#matchee";

    while (my @line = split "\n", <> ) {

    # print first 40 lines of record
        for my $counter (0..39) {
             print($line[$counter] . "\n");
        }

        # pad record with four extra blank lines
        # (last record already ends with a newline)
        print "\n" x 4;
    }
}

+1 for using $/ = "#matchee";

This isn’t quite right… the first record has 45 lines, the second has 44.