Many thanks for the various answers! I had come across the tr option while searching for a solution yesterday, but can't use it because I only need to change certain letters to numbers in a few locations in a larger text file that also contains regular text (where I wouldn't want to change vowels into numbers ;).
Thomas -----Original Message----- From: John W. Krahn [mailto:jwkr...@shaw.ca] Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2013 9:19 AM To: Perl Beginners Subject: Re: Substituting letters for numbers Hamann, T.D. wrote: > Hello, Hello, > Given a string: > > i994 > > where I want to replace the 'i' by a '1' the following regex > succesfully replaces the letter by a number: > > s/(i)(\d\d\d)/1$2/; tr/i/1/; > However, given a string: > > i99o > > where I want to replace the 'i' by a '1' and the 'o' by a '0' (zero), > the following regex fails: > > s/(i)(\d\d)(o)/1$20/; tr/io/10/; > for the obvious reason that perl looks for a pattern match at bracket > set #20, which doesn't exist. > > I can fix this by inserting a space in front of the zero, like this: > > s/(i)(\d\d)(o)/1$2 0/; > > and then using a second regular expression to remove the space, but > that somehow seems silly. Surely there is a quicker way to do this? s/(i)(\d\d)(o)/1${2}0/; John -- Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. -- Albert Einstein -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
