http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=977519


in reply to Perl substitution not working

My guess? Because the commas are each part of another element of @L1, because they had "notice", "[", "mpmstats:", or "\t" inbetween them.

Try this fix:

# ... if ( ($line =~ /notice/) && ($line =~ /rdy/) ) # Spaces to commas $line =~ s/ /,/g; # Get rid of "notice", "[", "mpmstats:", and tabs inside the line. $line =~ s/notice|\[|mpmstats:|\t//g; # Change the dreaded Triple Comma into the nice and smooth Single +Comma. $line =~ s/,,,/,/g; # Or even the following if you want to replace all multiple subs +equent commas by # just one: # $line =~ s/,,+/,/g; # Show me what I've got print $line; }

See how I wrote your [[] as \[? I think it's more readable that way. Also, regular expression understand \t just fine. There's no need to put it into a character class. And if ( ($line =~ /notice/) && ($line =~ /rdy/) ) { pretty much does the same thing as your two if statements. The inner parens are optional, but I prefer to write it that way.