Good day, great gurus,

I'm new to Perl, and programming in general. I'm trying to retrieve a column of data from my text file which spans a non-specific number of lines. So I did a regexp that will pick out the columns. However,my pattern would vary. I tried using a foreach loop unsuccessfully. How would I thus go about creating a script in perl that would:
1) Run a list of patterns (names in this case)
2) A pattern search of each in a file

The code I managed so far is this :

!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;



my @identity = qw/Joseph Clark May/;


my $data_file = 'C:\tests\Profiles.txt';
open (DAT, $data_file);

foreach $name(@identity) {
    while (<DAT>) {
        print if (/$name/ .. /\/\//);
    }
}

    

close (DAT);

NAME Joseph
blah
blah
blah
//
NAME Clark
 blah
 blah
 blah
blah
 //
NAME May
blah
blah
blah
//

!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use strict;
use warnings;

my $identity = 'Joseph|Clark|May';
my $data_file = 'C:/tests/Profiles.txt';
open (DAT, $data_file) or die "$!";
OUTTER: while (<DAT>) {
   if (/^NAME $identity$/) {
      print; 
      while(<DAT>) {
         print;
         next OUTTER if (m|//|);
      } 
   }
}

close (DAT);

Thanx a million, KevinADC! That did it for me