I apologise for having missed the OS info in your original post.

By unpacking the output you posted into a file and reading from that, I can reproduce your results.

However, if I open the resultant file and cut and paste the lines (which also fixes up the line endings) back into the __DATA__ section of my original program, it works as demonstrated.

My (tentative) conclusion is that the line-endings in the original file are screwed up. My evidence is that by using the -l switch on the one-liner above, any native line endings should have been stripped, but as you point out, the 0d's are still there. That suggests to me that when the file was moved from Win32 to unix, either the line endings weren't converted, or they were converted incorrectly.

P:\test>type test.pl
#! perl -slw
use strict;

while( <DATA> ) {
        chomp;
        print pack 'H*', $_;
}
__DATA__
416c616e6f6e2c20426172740d
353539302f454c0d
2d2d2d2d0d
4f274c657769732c204a6f686e2e0d
2d2d2d2d2f2d2d2d202d2d0d
6a6f686e0d
4c65204d7563682c426f204a6f0d
333430362f313635204e530d
656440612e6e6c0d
4162652d4a656e2c204d61722d4a6f0d
333432312f31363444204e530d
63626573740d

P:\test>test > test.txt

P:\test>type test.txt
Alanon, Bart
5590/EL
----
O'Lewis, John.
----/--- --
john
Le Much,Bo Jo
3406/165 NS
ed@a.nl
Abe-Jen, Mar-Jo
3421/164D NS
cbest

P:\test>u:od -t x1 test.dat
0000000 41 6c 61 6e 6f 6e 2c 20 42 61 72 74 0d 0d 0a 35
0000020 35 39 30 2f 45 4c 0d 0d 0a 2d 2d 2d 2d 0d 0d 0a
0000040 4f 27 4c 65 77 69 73 2c 20 4a 6f 68 6e 2e 0d 0d
0000060 0a 2d 2d 2d 2d 2f 2d 2d 2d 20 2d 2d 0d 0d 0a 6a
0000100 6f 68 6e 0d 0d 0a 4c 65 20 4d 75 63 68 2c 42 6f
0000120 20 4a 6f 0d 0d 0a 33 34 30 36 2f 31 36 35 20 4e
0000140 53 0d 0d 0a 65 64 40 61 2e 6e 6c 0d 0d 0a 41 62
0000160 65 2d 4a 65 6e 2c 20 4d 61 72 2d 4a 6f 0d 0d 0a
0000200 33 34 32 31 2f 31 36 34 44 20 4e 53 0d 0d 0a 63
0000220 62 65 73 74 0d 0d 0a
0000227
[download]

As you can see from the od output, after reversing the packing process, the file ends up with line endings of x'0d0d0a', which I think indicates that there are dos-style line endings in the original file at your end, which perl-on-unix doesn't handle, and it is that that is causing the regexes to fail.

The answer (I think) to your problem would be to use the appropriate utility (or one of the perl one-liners kicking around this site) to convert the line endings on the file prior to running the script.

You could do it integrally to the script, but that would kind of negate the benefit of what I was originally trying to demonstrate, ie. that if you want to process 3 lines at a time, reading 3 lines on each iteration of the loop is much easier than having 3 cases within the loop.

Anyway, I hope this helps in some way, and hasn't completely wasted your time.