comment on

Good afternoon all,

I have a hash containing thousands of lines of text from hundreds of different files. Every time a certain phrase appears in the hash (in the SSCCE below, "This is"), I want to create a new txt file which prints both the phrase and all subsequent text until we reach the next "This is".

So, for instance, I had hoped that the script below would create six text files (named UserA_1, UserA_2 etc.) where the first file contained the text "This is line 1 from text 1 another line here which should be included in the text file with the above line.", the second file contained the text "This is line 2 from text 1", and so on.

However, although the script below creates the 6 new text files (and names them appropriately), it does not actually print anything into the files.


#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

#SSCCE:
my %mycorpus = (

            text1 => "This is line 1 from text 1
another line here which should be included in the text file with the a
+bove line.
This is line 2 from text 1
This is line 3 from text 1",
            
            
            text2 => "This is line 1 from text 2
This is line 2 from text 2
another line here which should be included in the text file with the a
+bove line.
This is line 3 from text 2",

);


my $count = 1;

foreach my $filename (sort keys %mycorpus) {
    my $outfile;
               
    while ($mycorpus{$filename} =~ /This is/g) {

    close $outfile if $outfile;
        open $outfile, '>', "UserA_$count.txt"
            or die "could not open";
            $count++;

        
    print {$outfile} $_;
}
}
[download]

I have been working on this script for nearly a week, but I can't spot my mistake(s), and thus I would be very grateful for any help.

EDIT:

I probably should have mentioned in my original post that my code here is based on a more basic script that I use to split and print text NOT stored in a hash. This script (reproduced as an SSCCE below) works successfully and returns the desired output.

my $count = 1;

my $outfile;
while (<DATA>) {
    if ( my($regex) = /This is/g) {
        close $outfile if $outfile;
        open $outfile, '>', "UserA$1_$count.txt"
            or die "could not open 'UserA$regex.txt' $!";
            $count++;
    
}
    print {$outfile} $_;

}

__DATA__
This is line 1 from text 1
another line here which should be included in the text file with the a
+bove line.
This is line 2 from text 1
This is line 3 from text 1    
This is line 1 from text 2
This is line 2 from text 2
another line here which should be included in the text file with the a
+bove line.
This is line 3 from text 2
[download]

In reply to Split and print hash based on regex by Maire

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