splitting up a long text at regular intervals

[Anonymous Monk]

salve monks,

I have the text of a play which I was to put into a presentation. So I need to split it up every 15 lines or so.

I had already stated to do this in vim by recording a macro where I would insert some special text say xñx (which I can then parse upon) after I'd moved down around 15 lines.

Can this be done in perl (more automatically I guess)? Also does it complicate things to not want to introduce the parsing marker when the 15 line account occurs in the middle of a paragraph?

Sorry for not having a good grasp of the parsing lingo here, but hopefully you get what I want to do.

[ioannis]

Since preserving paragraphs is more important than exact linecount; this is about what you want: keep reading paragraphs, until they exceed a predefined number of lines.

use Fatal qw(open);
use constant MAXLINES => 2;
open my $i, 'data.txt';

(local $/, my ($sum, $buf)) = ( '', 0 , undef); 

while (<>) {
        $buf .= $_;
        $sum +=  tr /\n/\n/;
        next  if $sum < MAXLINES ;

        print "$buf----------";; 
        ($sum, $buf) = (0, undef );
}

[GrandFather]

Something like this?

use warnings;
use strict;

my $linesSinceBreak = 0;

while (<DATA>)
  {
  chomp;
  $linesSinceBreak = 0, print "\n<<BreakHere\n" if ++$linesSinceBreak 
+>= 15 && ! length $_;
  print "$_\n";
  }

Read more... Sample data and output (3 kB)

[EvanCarroll]

I'm not sure as to what exactly your asking, but allow me to point you into the direction of unless ($. % 15) {}

[pg]

$. is error prone, as one can have multiple files open in a program, but there is only one $. I would rather call input_line_number() with specific file handler.

use IO::Handle;
open(MYSELF1, "<", "test.pl");
open(MYSELF2, "<", "test.pl");
while (<MYSELF1>) {
    print "after reading from myself1: $.\n";
    if ($. % 2) {
        <MYSELF2>;
        print "after reading from myself2: $.\n";
    }
    print "returned values from input_line_number: (";
    print MYSELF1->input_line_number(), ", ";
    print MYSELF2->input_line_number(), ")\n";
}
close(MYSELF1);
close(MYSELF2);

[Cody Pendant]

I had a question like this, where I wanted to read from a file in chunks, not specified by number of lines but by number of bytes, but still, you might find it interesting.

[stabu]

I was the OP, except I didn't log in.

I want to say thanks for all the answers. I have plenty to work on. I'm beginning to think that perlmonks is really the tops, each time I get a fww quality answers even when I hurry my question. One for the rare sites where energy and quality coexist. Congrats to all.