Thanks to all those who responded to my original post. I posted the
clarifcation below as a reply to the original thread, but I think it was
lost in the shuffle.
I think I failed to make something clear. What I need is to selectively
replace only
certain characters when they appear in a string within brackets. I don't
need to transform the string as a whole. So if I
have:
Don't Match the capital M unless {the M is inside brackets} then Match it
I need to be able to change the M inside the brackets in such a way that the
entire line is output, but with, in this case, the single change that the
one M within the brackets has been changed to another character, say an X,
so that the line would now read:
Don't Match the capital M unless {the X is inside brackets} then Match it
I need to process a very large file (c. 20MB) in this way, and there are
about a dozen
different single characters what would have to be systematically changed to
an alternative character. Actually, what I want to do is change the M, for
instance, to the Unicode character U+1E43. I've been able to apply these
changes to the file as a whole, but don't know how to apply them only to
certain characters that appear in text within brackets.
I was assuming (wrongly?) that I would have to set up some kind of loop to
run through each string within brackets to test for the M (and a number of
other characters) and change it to the U+1E43 (an a number of other Unicode
characters) if found. Can I do all this just using regular expressions with
s/// or tr///?
I hope this is more clear. Thanks again to everyone who has offered help.
I'm learning a lot about regular expressions! (or at least I'm trying to!)
David
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