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in reply to Handling A File In Human-Compatible Chunks

I don't know of an existing module but you could do it something like this:
sub get_nice_chunk { my($fh, $size) = @_; local $/ = ''; local $_; my $chunk; $chunk .= $_ while $_ = <$fh> and length($_) + length($chunk) < $size; seek $fh, tell($fh) - length($_), 0 if length($_) + length($chunk) < $size; return $chunk; } print "got chunk: $_" while $_ = get_nice_chunk(\*DATA, 19); __DATA__ foo bar baz quux ichi ni san shi the last bit
So that just sets the INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR to paragraph mode, reads paragraphs until we've hit the $size limit, rewinds the file pointer and returns the chunk. However, this does suffer from the bug that it won't read pargraphs greater than $size but I'll leave that as an exercise to the OP of what to do in that case.
HTH

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