Re^2: In place search and replace with a hash

[hkates]

Anomalous, you're right. As I wrote in my original post, I have never actually used s/foo/bar other than in a one liner. I was looking for a way to find and replace strings in a file without writing to a new output file and when the replacement strings are not the same length as the sub-strings that are replaced. Clearly I am not doing this the correct way, and if there is a correct way, I haven't been able to find/understand it yet. What I want is to open a file and if a line is:

'nc7-52:p39|read1|1|19|296|0.0642'

and change it to:

C_fraterna_nc7-52

using a hash where $hash{nc7-52}=C_fraterna_nc7-52

Update: From this example it looks like it would be easy to print to output, but some lines in the file will not be modified and I still want to preserve them.

sorry, this thread may be a bit out of control since I had too many problems to begin with

[AnomalousMonk]

From this example it looks like it would be easy to print to output ...

As a first step, create a small test input file and just print the altered and unaltered lines to standard output, e.g.,
    print $my_new_line_what_is_just_the_way_i_want_it;
When this limited, test output looks ok, start to think about the process of opening a new file and writing to that file instead of STDOUT. When that looks ok, start thinking about all the input/output file verification and renaming that has to happen. (I'm sure there are modules to facilitate the "edit in place" process, but I don't know what they are off-hand.)

[AnomalousMonk]

Please see Update and Further Update to Re: In place search and replace with a hash. (Unfortunately, we may be playing "update tag.")