Re^3: Parsing a text file in Perl.

[Athanasius]

If you want to match [==========] in a regex, you need to escape the square brackets — otherwise they form a character class.

However, this approach cannot work: you are reading the data file line-by-line, which to Perl means from one newline (\n) to the next, but a typical line of input looks like this:

< 0x00070: 2d 64 6f 77  6e 0d 0a 5b  3d 3d 3d 3d  3d 3d 3d 3d  -down..
+[========

As can be seen, there are no lines which match [==========]. Likewise, the special regex character ^ matches at the beginning of a line, and neither [==========] nor tests appears at the beginning of a line.

You will need a different strategy, along the lines outlined by hippo below.

Hope that helps,