Re: Why did you become a Perl expert (or programmer)?

[Veltro]

Heard about Perl much longer ago but never thought about looking into it until one day, I did a search for a backup script and found this Perl program. So I installed Perl and downloaded the script and it worked very well. I started to become curious now, but it looked difficult, wtf are all those special characters doing...

Then came a time that I needed find and replace something in a file and since I had Perl on my computer now I gave it a shot and started testing.

I went back in my archives and here are the two little gems:

while (<>) {
        next if /^$/;
        print;
    }

and

$text = "A'B'C" ;
$text = replacequote($text);
print $text;

sub replacequote {
my $X=$_[0];
while ( $X =~ /\'/ ) {
(my $l, my $r) = split ( /\'/, $X, 2);
$X = "$l\\QUOTE$r";
}
while ( $X =~ /\\QUOTE/ ) {
(my $l, my $r) = split ( /\\QUOTE/, $X, 2);
$X = "$l\\'$r";
}
return $X;
}

sub replacequote_better {
my $X=$_[0];
while ( $X =~ /[^\\]\'/ ) {
#This line does not give the desired result that I have in mind (l rem
+ains empty):
(my $l, my $r) = split ( /[^\\]\'/, $X, 2);
#print "left: $l\n";
#print "right: $r\n";
@array = split ( /[^\\]+\'/, $X, 2);
print $_, "|" foreach @array;
print "\n" ;
$X = "$l\\'$r";
#print "new $X\n" ;
}
return $X;
}