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in reply to Re: Search and replace
in thread Search and replace

Thank you!! Really I am weak in handling regex of this kind. Thank you soooo much

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Re^3: Search and replace
by Bharath666 (Novice) on Jan 31, 2013 at 15:59 UTC

    Also if you don't mind can you please explain me how exactly this command works

    $found =~ s/ENV{\"(.*?)\"}/\$ENV(\"$1\")/g;

    Thanks!!

      I thought I already had. :-) But OK, let’s add an /x modifier to the regex to make it easier to break apart:

      $found =~ s/ ENV{\" # match the characters: ENV{" (.*?) # followed by any characters -- this sequence +is the "value", and the parentheses capture it into the special varia +ble $1 \"} # followed by: "} / \$ENV( # and substitute a literal: $ENV(" $1 # followed by the captured "value" \") # followed by: ") /gx; # and repeat the search & replacement to the e +nd of $found

      Notes:

      • The double quotes are backslashed only because I was using a one-liner (and I’m on Windows). This is unnecessary in a .pl script. (But the $ must be backslashed to show that it is literal, not the special symbol for “match the end of a line” (in the search part) or a sigil denoting a scalar variable to be interpolated (in the replacement part). Update: Added the words from “(in the search part)” to the end of the sentence.)

      • The ? in the capture group (.*?) makes the match non-greedy. So the regex engine looks for the fewest number of characters occurring between ENV{" and "}. Without the ?, the match would be greedy, and on the string:

        ENV{"VCINSTALLDIR"}\ATLMFC\LIB\amd64;ENV{"LIBPATH"}

        it would match

        VCINSTALLDIR"}\ATLMFC\LIB\amd64;ENV{"LIBPATH
      • which is not what we want!

      Hope that helps,

      Athanasius <°(((><contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

        Yeah!! I got it now :) Thanks a lot :)