Re: Re: Massive File Editing

[Kage]

Nothing unexpected, I just can't make any good way to replace every instance of an anchor href of "main.php?page=..." to "/?id=..." in every .shtml file.

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“A script is what you give the actors. A program is what you give the audience.” ~ Larry Wall

[MarkM]

The easiest solution (although not the most efficient) would be to invoke Perl from within Perl. For example, use the loops you already have defined to gather a set of path names into an array. Then, invoke:

system('perl', '-I.bak', '-pe', 's[main.php\?page=][/?id=]g', @pathnam
+es) == 0
    or die "Subcommand failed with return code $?.\n";

Try to make the regexp as accurate and complete as possible to avoid incorrect alterations. If you want a longer term solution that is a bit more efficient, see the perlrun manpage to see an example of the code that approximates the behaviour of -pI.bak.

NOTE: If the above system() invocation does not work, try changing 'perl' to be $^X ($EXECUTABLE_NAME with 'use English'). If the regular expression becomes very complicated, it may be easier to store the command in a perl script, and use the sub-script name instead of -e '...' in the system() invocation.

[Jaap]

First open the file and read the content into a scalar
Then do a

$fileContent =~ s/(<a href=")main\.php\?page\=/$1\/\?id\=/g;

And then write the new contents back to the same file (or a new one with an added extension like .new or so