CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexperl
Dirty Penguin
Dirty Penguin

Reputation: 4402

Perl: Specifying occurrences in substitution regex

I'm trying to substitute all instance of a comma or a hyphen in the string $charlie. Here is the code I initially tried:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $charlie = "Charlie, 59, 2009";
print "Old Charlie: $charlie\n";
$charlie =~ s/[\,-]/ /;
print "New Charlie: $charlie\n";

This produces the output:

C:\scripts\perl\sandbox>charlie_substitute.pl
Old Charlie: Charlie, 59, 2009
New Charlie: Charlie  59, 2009

As you can tell, only the first comma was replaced by a space. In an attempt to account for multiple commas, I changed the regex to $charlie =~ s/[\,-]{1,2}/ /; but I still get the same output.

How would I correctly specify the number of occurrences to look for in a substitution?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 69

Answers (1)

ikegami
ikegami

Reputation: 385935

Use /g to replace "globally".

$charlie =~ s/[,\-]/ /g;
                      ^
                      |

(, isn't special in character classes or even in regex in general, so it doesn't need escaping. On the other, - can be special in character classes. If anything should be escaped, it's -. That said, - doesn't need to be escaped if it's the first or last character of the class as it is here.)

Upvotes: 5

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