regex related...search and delete

[freekngeek]

Hey all, I am working on a text file and I want to delete some specific letter, Like L & W which stand for length and width. For an example I have (L 2 W 7), but I want to have only values inside the brackets. I couldnt find any answer by myself. So I hope if you could tell me the way or is there any way to do this ?

[choroba]

You can use a simple substitution. [LW] is a character class containing both L and W, the final /g is needed to replace both the letters.

$string =  "(L 2 W 7)";
$string =~ s/[LW] //g; # Replace L or W followed by a space by nothing
+.
print $string, "\n";

[freekngeek]

Thanks a lot man. it's working :)

[The Perlman]

bla ...

depending on your textfile this can be indefinitely complex.

are parens ever nested?

is it always (L \d+ W \d+)?

If it's not a fix format I would try to match every parens-pair, and call a function with the match with /e modifier. s/\(.*?\)/kill_LW($&)/ge

[freekngeek]

It's a fix format and it's working now. Thank you for your solution, May be I'll try this some other time.

[LanX]

> It's a fix format and it's working now.

no it's not, chorobas solution will delete any "L " outside of parens too.

if its really a fix format, use something like s/\(L (\d+) W (\d+)\)/($1 $2)/g

[Anonymous Monk]

but I want to have only values inside the brackets. I couldnt find any answer by myself.

Where did you look?

Have you read perlintro#Regular expressions, Parentheses for capturing

Did you check perlfaq6: Regular Expressions?

perlrequick ? perlretut?

What did you try, did you try quotemeta? Did you escape "(" like "\(" ?

[Anonymous Monk]

See Re: print output from the text file. (marpa scanless dsl calculator), Re^2: Help with regular expression ( m/\G/gc ), perlfaq6#What good is \G in a regular expression?