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How to replace on a smooth way?

by bestsiteeditor (Initiate)
on Apr 19, 2012 at 13:51 UTC ( #965961=perlquestion: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??
bestsiteeditor has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I need smooth solution to replace each instance in a string that starts with § with the same instance surrounded with instance

for example the string

"§14.2. done -!! this direction was in contradiction with §8.4. §14.4. Sorry, cannot get the logic - when"

should become :

§14.2. done -!! this direction was in contradiction with §8.4. §14.4. Sorry, cannot get the logic - when"

In a nutshel - anything that starts with § to the first white space should be surrounded with tags.

Comment on How to replace on a smooth way?
Re: How to replace on a smooth way?
by Ratazong (Prior) on Apr 19, 2012 at 14:04 UTC

    $s =~ s/(§[\S]*)/\[$1\]/g;

    [download]
    You search for a §, followed with anything but a blank and store it to $1. Then you replace it by itself surrounded by brackets. The modifier g means that you do it as often as possible.

    Update: Thanks to i5513 and MidLifeXis for their improvements of my regex and for polishing my rusty knowledge! I like that in PerlMonks: by answering questions you often learn something for yourself, too :-)
[reply]
[d/l]
      Thank you so much, but here comes the tricky part: I have to match "§" and in the replacement to use "& # 0167;" otherwise - either does not match for "& # 0167;", or replacing with "§" in it - brings strange prints
[reply]

        The stuff within the parens is a capture - if you move the § outside of the capturing parenthesis, and then add your required entity to the replacement text, it should do what you need.

        So, if you have a replacement s/(A\S+)/[$1]/ and want to replace A with something else, you would use s/A(\S+)/[B$1]/ instead, replacing A and B as necessary.

        A read of perlre, perlrequick, and perlretut may be helpful. I also wonder if HTML::Entities may be a more appropriate solution to the second requirement.

        --MidLifeXis

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        bestsiteeditor:

        That sounds like you may have an encoding problem, then.

        ...roboticus

        When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

[reply]
      Hello,
      Backslashes can be omited in the second operator of the substitution, there is not need to scape brackets there.
[reply]

      In addition to i5513's response, you do not need to place \S within brackets — it is already a character class.

      --MidLifeXis

[reply]
[d/l]

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