How to remove first part of every line?

Question

Say I have a text file that is of the format:

S1:I am line one.
S2:I am line two.
S3:I am line three.
S4:I am line four.

How can I remove the ID part of each line (so that I'm only left with I am line one. and so on)? Is it better to change the input record separator $/ or use a regex that removes ID?

Answer 1

Like this perhaps? It uses a regex that matches everything up to and including the first colon : and removes it

perl -pe 's/^[^:]*://' myfile > newfile

Within a program:

open my $fh, '<', $filename or die qq{Unable to open "$filename" for input: $!};

while ( <$fh> ) {

    s/^[^:]*://;

    # Use remainder of line left in $_
}