File slurping into $text and then accessing a specific line?

[legend]

thundergnat of this forum gave me an interesting program that looks like this:

use warnings;
use strict;

$/ = "_END=======\n";

while (<DATA>) {
    s/========KEYWORD.+\n//g;
    print '-' x 80, $_, '-' x 80;
    $text = $_;
}

I was wondering if it is possible to access a particular line in the $text variable. I mean, once it has grabbed a chunk of data, I want to print a specific line from that. Is that possible by any chance?

[Narveson]

Yes, it is possible. But why are you slurping into $text?

Slurping is recommended only if the presence of multiple lines of data in a single scalar somehow makes your task easier. Usually this is not the case.

Far from showing us why you needed to slurp, you are asking how to access a particular line.

use warnings;
use strict;
my $PARTICULAR_LINE;  # regex

print '-' x 80;

while (<DATA>) {
    s/========KEYWORD.+\n//;
    print;
    
    if ( /$PARTICULAR_LINE/ ) { access($_) }
}
print '-' x 80;

__DATA__

This does the same printing job as the code you posted, and it accesses the particular line.

[hipowls]

Depending on how you decide on the particular line. There is

my $line = ( split "\n", $_ )[$wanted_line];

which splits $_ into a list and selects a line by number or

my ($line) = /^(.*?PATTERN.*?)$/ms;

which will pick a line on what PATTERN it conatins.

[Prof Vince]

If you want to access a line by its number, you might be interested in using Tie::File.