Reading in Block

[eversuhoshin]

Hello,

I am new to Perl and I have been trying to figure this out like crazy. I have a transcripts that are divided by ---------for each executive speaking. I want to count how many words each executive speaks. For instance,

--------------------------------------------

Joe Moglia, Ameritrade - CEO 3

--------------------------------------------
Thank you, Donna. Good morning, everybody and welcome to our last conference call for Ameritrade as a stand-alone entity and for our very, very first conference call for TD Ameritrade.
--------------------------------------------

Randy MacDonald, Ameritrade - CFO 13

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There's one other element that makes it easier which is that Waterhouse outsources their clearing to ADP and we've had -- this is our eighth integration and we've gone through that with ADP a number of times now. So we have a pretty well worn cookbook on how to do that. ------------------------------------------------------------

So I know that each executive speaking is divided by ------------ but I don't know how to tell perl for each executive count the number of words. I was thinking of the flip flop matching but I am not sure. I guess the code would go

while<text>{
if executive name == executive
  $count=number line
   if the next line is ------- and number line = count+1
   if !! \-+ !!//..!!/\-+!!
      count number of words
    next  \-+ | \-+

Help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely, Pureum Kim