Handling A File In Human-Compatible Chunks

[Cody Pendant]

I want to process a text file in human-compatible chunks of a certain size or below, as in, not "sysread" for chunks of 2048 bytes, but something which won't have end up dividing words or sentences.

By which I mean I want to go paragraph by paragraph, until I get to a chunk of a certain size, so I got something like this:

open( X, 'x.txt' );
my ( $chunk, $line );
while (<X>) {
    $line = $_;
    if ( ( length($chunk) + length($line) ) > 2048 ) {
        # if the next line would take us over the set size
        doSomethingWithChunk($chunk);
        $chunk = $line;
    }
    else {
        $chunk .= $line;
        # append line and keep going
    }
}
doSomethingWithChunk($chunk);
# process whatever's left in $chunk at the end

which is fine, but what I'd really like to do is have some kind of sub which would return me those chunks until the file ran out.

Something like how Algorithm::Permute does this:

my $p = new Algorithm::Permute(['a'..'d']);
  while (@res = $p->next) {
    # do something with @res
  }

Is there a module or a recognised way to do this? I'm blanking on the way to do it.