How Do I Use the tr Function's 'c' Option?

anniyan has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Monks, I have one question realated to translation.

I have read the following from an online material.

The c option (c is for "complement") translates all characters that are not specified. For example, the statement $string =~ tr/\d/ /c; replaces everything that is not a digit with a space.

But when i tried the following i am getting the following output than what i expected.

$a = 'acvdef431234';
$a =~ tr/\d/ /c;
print "$a";
output:   d
expected output:      431234
[download]

But if i used [0-9] it is working good.

$a = 'acvdef431234';
$a =~ tr/[0-9]/ /c;
print "$a";
output:      431234
[download]

I am in total confusion. Could anyone explain whats going on there.

Regards,
Anniyan
(CREATED in HELL by DEVIL to s|EVILS|GOODS|g in WORLD)

2005-08-24 Retitled by Arunbear, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'tr///c'

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Re: How Do I Use the tr Function's 'c' Option? by monkey_boy (Priest) on Aug 24, 2005 at 16:30 UTC
Straight from perlop `Note that tr does not do regular expression character classes such as +\d or [:lower:].` [download] This is not a Signature...	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How Do I Use the tr Function's 'c' Option? by halley (Prior) on Aug 24, 2005 at 16:34 UTC
When in doubt, trust the actual Perl documentation over any other website. Type "perldoc perlop" at your command line. The issue with the unofficial documentation you found is that tr does not take special regular expression escapes like "\d" or bracketed classes like "[abc]" in its arguments. Note that "tr" does not do regular expression character classes such as "\d" or "[:lower:]". `$string =~ tr/0123456789/ /c;` [download] It does support ranges, but use no brackets. Shortcut the above with the special hyphen: `$string =~ tr/0-9/ /c;` [download] -- `[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How Do I Use the tr Function's 'c' Option? by japhy (Canon) on Aug 24, 2005 at 18:58 UTC
So which of these sites did you find it on? Perl in 21 days Perl in 14 (!) days Quick Guide to Perl Jeff `japhy` Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and `perl` hacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart	[reply]
Re^2: How Do I Use the tr Function's 'c' Option? by derby (Abbot) on Aug 24, 2005 at 20:08 UTC
Nope ... quick google leads me to believe it's Perl Unleashed. I wonder if I could convince my congressman to introduce a "expired now because it's crappy and wrong" copyright clause. -derby	[reply]
Re^3: How Do I Use the tr Function's 'c' Option? by japhy (Canon) on Aug 24, 2005 at 22:30 UTC
Since he italicized his source text, I did a google search with the exact text "replaces everything that is not a digit with a space" which yielded my three results. Jeff `japhy` Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and `perl` hacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart	[reply]
Re^2: How Do I Use the tr Function's 'c' Option? by anniyan (Monk) on Aug 25, 2005 at 08:50 UTC
japhy you are right, i read in perl in 21 days. So the documentation is wrong.oops. Regards, Anniyan (CREATED in HELL by DEVIL to s\|EVILS\|GOODS\|g in WORLD)	[reply]

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