[MacPerl] how to prepare (mac) multi-line (text) file, then match ...

[s.m.eastham@abdn.ac.uk (Stephen Eastham)]

hopefully, i'm asking the right question:

imagine a file containing a list of words and another file containing
a text which has these words in.  for each word in the list, i'd
like to find every occurrence of that word in the text document,
and match/strip out the SENTENCE(S) which contain(s) that word.
every line in the text document ends in linefeeds.

the first approach seems to be either to read in the whole text document
(which sounds dangerous - just how big could the document be before things
go hay-wire?) or read in a paragraph at a time. thinking about
the paragraph-oriented approach, how does a mac/macperl distinguish lines from
paragraphs in a text file?  i.e. if i have to 'massage' the text document
(manually)
into lines/paragraphs, should i place carriage returns between sentences and
a newline between paragraphs, or is it some other combination of particular
control characters in particular places?

actually, i don't want to have to do the pre-processing manually, if i can
avoid it.  is it possible to take my original text file, in which all the
lines end
in linefeeds, and make a new file with nothing more and nothing less than
a SENTENCE on each line?  then the matching would be very quick and simple.

many thanks,

Stephen

s.m.eastham@abdn.ac.uk
Language-Learning Researcher @ Aberdeen University






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