http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1038142

bill b has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I'm polishing man page output from pandoc (google it). I need to clean up cruft that occurs around the man page bullet macros and replace it with \(bu (bullet macro syntax). Here's what I have:

s/T\}\@T.*T\}\@T\{/\(bu/sm;

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The matching works perfectly, but no matter how much I play with the substitution string, I always get (bu without the initial backslash. I've tried /\\(bu/, /\\\(bu/, /Q and /E, but nothing works. I always get (bu in the output.

TIA, Bill

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Re: special character substitution
by choroba (Cardinal) on Jun 10, 2013 at 19:57 UTC
    Works for me: 
    $_ = "T}\@T...T}\@T{";
s/T\}\@T.*T\}\@T\{/\\(bu/sm;
print;

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    Output: 

    \(bu

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    لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ
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      Thanks. I'm an idiot--I was inadvertently erasing the \ in another part of postprocessing. Sigh. thanks again, bill
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Re: special character substitution
by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Jun 10, 2013 at 22:08 UTC

    Also, using  ' (single-quote) as a delimiter for either or both of the substitution pattern or replacement string of a  s/// will force the use of single-quotish (non-)interpolation and escapology. 

    >perl -wMstrict -le
"$_ = 'T}@T...T}@T{';
 s'T}@T.*T}@T{'\(bu'sm;
 print qq{'$_'};
"
'\(bu'

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