Extract file contents between given lines using perl - perl

Question

I want to use only Sed in Perl to capture the file contents between 1000 and 2000 lines in a given file.
I tried the below but it didn't work,Can someone help me on this please.
$firstLIne="1000";
$lastline="2000";
$output=`sed -n '$firstLIne,$lastline'p sample.txt`;

Answer 1

Here is another pure perl solution:
my ($firstline, $lastline) = (1000,2000);
open my $fh, '<', 'sample.txt' or die "$!";
while(<$fh>){
print if $. == $firstline .. $. == $lastline;
}
if you don't use the variables anywhere else, you can use the special use case of .. with constants (4th paragraph if you use constant expression they automatically get compared to $.):
while(<$fh>){
print if 1000 .. 2000;
}
Here is the important part from the perldoc for the .. operator:
In scalar context, ".." returns a boolean value. The operator is bistable, like a flip-flop, and emulates the line-range (comma) operator of sed, awk, and various editors.
Edit Per request, with storing the intermediate lines in a variable.
my ($firstline, $lastline) = (1000,2000);
my $output = '';
open my $fh, '<', 'sample.txt' or die $!;
while(<$fh>){
$output .= $_ if $. == $firstline .. $. == $lastline;
}
print $ouput;
Also, if your file isn't too big (it fits completely into memory) you also can read it into a list and select the lines you're interested in:
my $output = join '', (<$fh>)[$firstline+1..$lastline]

Answer 2

For comparison, to do this in Perl only, one could write:
my $firstLine=1000;
my $lastLine=2000;
my $fn="sample.txt";
my $output;
open (my $fh, "<", $fn) or die "Could not open file '$fn': $!\n";
while (<$fh>) {
last if $. > $lastLine;
$output .= $_ if $. >= $firstLine;
}
close($fh);
Note that this will stop reading from file after line $lastLine.. so if the file contains 100,000 lines it will only read the first 2000 lines..

Answer 3

If you just want to print out the lines then:
perl -ne 'print if 1000 .. 2000' example_data.txt
should work.
If you want to incorporate that into a script somehow then you can "semi-slurp" the filehandle:
use strict;
use warnings;
open my $filehandle, 'example_data.txt' or die $!;
my $lines_1k_to_2k ;
while (<$filehandle>) {
$lines_1k_to_2k .= $_ if 1000 .. 2000 ;
}
print $lines_1k_to_2k ;
The .= operator will add the lines to the string in variable $lines_1k_to_2k only if they are in the range 1000 .. 2000