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One, hopefully final, comment. It wouldn't be difficult to modify the above script to use the perl DBI module and a postgres or mysql database to store all of these records in a searchable database....with the case name as the title index field and the text in a text field.

Using the list-of-cases-volume-1.txt (with line numbers stripped and saved as cases2.txt), the output is:

Some of the input lines (4176 out of 12861 lines) were for duplicate case names, so i modified the script above to append the extra lines for that case to the existing file, with -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= as separator.

Some of the case titles were too long to be used as a filename, so i used substr($_,0,200) to limit the filename to the first 200 characters. Another alternative, which would result in non- human-sensible filenames would be to use the md5sum hash of the case name as the filename. The case name would still be in the first line of the file.

$ mkdir -p out/
$ hef.pl cases2.txt

Using Lambert* cases as example:

$ ls -1 out/Lambert*
out/Lambert v Aeretree 1 Lord Raymond 223, 91 ER 1045.txt
out/Lambert v Atkins and Another 2 Campbell 272, 170 ER 1153.txt
out/Lambert v Cook 1 Lord Raymond 237, 91 ER 1055.txt
out/Lambert v Oakes 1 Lord Raymond 443, 91 ER 1194.txt
out/Lambert v Pack 1 Salkeld 127, 91 ER 120.txt
out/Lambert v Peyton [1860] 7 House of Lords Cases 423, 11 ER 169.txt

Using the list-of-cases-volume-1.txt (with line numbers stripped and saved as cases2.txt), the output (Using Lambert* cases as examples) is:

$ mkdir -p out/
$ ./hef.pl cases2.txt
$ ls -1 out/Lambert*
out/Lambert v Aeretree 1 Lord Raymond 223, 91 ER 1045.txt
out/Lambert v Atkins and Another 2 Campbell 272, 170 ER 1153.txt
out/Lambert v Cook 1 Lord Raymond 237, 91 ER 1055.txt
out/Lambert v Oakes 1 Lord Raymond 443, 91 ER 1194.txt
out/Lambert v Pack 1 Salkeld 127, 91 ER 120.txt
out/Lambert v Peyton [1860] 7 House of Lords Cases 423, 11 ER 169.txt

Some of the input lines (4176 out of 12861 lines) were for duplicate case names, so i modified the script above to append the extra lines for that case to the existing file, with -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= as separator.

Some of the case titles were too long to be used as a filename, so i used substr($_,0,200) to limit the filename to the first 200 characters. Another alternative, which would result in non- human-sensible filenames would be to use the md5sum hash of the case name as the filename. The case name would still be in the first line of the file.

Some of the case titles were too long to be used as a filename, so i used substr($_,0,200) to limit the filename to the first 200 characters. Another alternative, which would result in non- human-sensible filenames would be to use the md5sum hash of the case name as the filename. The case name would still be in the first line of the file.