Disclaimer: I'm a newbie at scripting in perl, this is partially a learning exercise (but still a project for work). Also, I have a much stronger grasp on shell scripting, so my examples will likely be formatted in that mindset (but I would like to create them in perl). Sorry in advance for my verbosity, I want to make sure I am at least marginally clear in getting my point across

I have a text file (a reference guide) that is a Word document converted to text then swapped from Windows to UNIX format in Notepad++. The file is uniform in that each section of the file had the same fields/formatting/tables.

What I have planned to do, in a basic way is grab each section, keyed by unique batch job names and place all of the values into a database (or maybe just an excel file) so all the fields can be searched/edited for each job much easier than in the word file and possibly create a web interface later on.

So what I want to do is grab each section by doing something like:
sed -n '/job_name_1_regex/,/job_name_2_regex/' file.txt --how would this be formatted within a perl script?
(grab the section in total, then break it down further from there)

To read the file in the script I have open FORMAT_FILE, 'test_format.txt'; and then use foreach $line (<FORMAT_FILE>) to parse the file line by line. --is there a better way?

My next problem is that since I converted from a word doc with tables, which looks like:

 Table Heading 1      Table Heading 2
Heading 1/Value 1    Heading 2/Value 1
Heading 1/Value 2    Heading 2/Value 2

but the text file it looks like:

Table Heading 1 
Table Heading 2
Heading 1/Value 1
Heading 1/Value 2
Heading 2/Value 1
Heading 2/Value 2

So I want to have "Heading 1" and "Heading 2" as a columns name and then put the respective values there. I just am not sure how to get the values in relation to the heading from the text file. The values of Heading 1 will always be the line number of Heading 1 plus 2 (Heading 1, Heading 2, Values for heading 1). I know this can be done in awk/sed pretty easily, just not sure how to address it inside a perl script.

After I have all the right values and such, linking it up to a database may be an issue as well, I haven't started looking at the way perl interacts with DBs yet.

Sorry if this is a bit scatterbrained...it's still not fully formed in my head.