On Mon, 2 Feb 2009, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: > On 1/30/09 4:39 PM, "Jay Luker" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > >> $r = do { local $/; <C> }; >> >> Explained here: >> http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=287647 > > > As long as I can afford the RAM (a batch of MARC records might be 10's or > 100's of megabytes in size), this looks like the best solution. Thanks. Is there a seperator between MARC records? If so, you can set $/ to that, and you'll get one MARC record at a time. If the record seperator is an empty line, you'll probably want to read 'perlvar' in perldocs ... search for 'INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR' for the difference between setting it to '' vs "\n\n": http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html -Joe