CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Hydrothermal
Hydrothermal

Reputation: 5081

Is it possible to perform multiple separate replacements with a single regular expression?

If I have the string aab12a221b1 and I want to replace it with zzy12z221y1 (i.e. replace a with z and b with y), is it possible to do that with a single regular expression? Two separate expressions would be trivial (/a/g -> z, /b/g -> y), but I am looking for a method to accomplish this without having to run more than one regex. So far I have been unable to find any way to do this.

Specifically, I am using grepWin to do some replacements across a large amount of files, and there are four characters I need to replace with other characters. The amount of time it would take to run four instead of one is minimal and I'm not on a time limit, so this is more of a hypothetical question than anything else.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 41

Answers (1)

guido
guido

Reputation: 19224

This may not solve your particular problem, but generally speaking it is possible - if you can use perl regular expressions - to pass captured groups as arguments to functions for the replacement, using the e modifier.

%map = ("a", "z",
        "b", "y");
sub get_mapping{
   return $map{"$_[0]"};
}
$str=~s/([ab])/get_mapping($1)/eg;

Example running here: http://ideone.com/nVJTXk

Upvotes: 1

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