On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Cy Kurtz wrote: > OK ... Remember you asked for it.
Right. Because without sufficient context, it's impossible to give an adequate answer to a wildly open-ended question. Make sense? > I have at least a dozen files that I want to update. I want to do > this: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] somedirectory]$ perl -pi~ -e > 's/./officers-gasenate.html/http://www.legis.state.ga.us/cgi-bin/peo_list.pl?List=stsenatedl/' > ./contactus.html That won't work. This gets reduced to s/./officers-gasenate.html/ Which matches a dot /./ -- which is a metacharacter meaning "matches anything at all" -- and replaces it with /officers-gasenate.html/ In other words, it will turn this string -- abc -- into this officers-gasenate.htmlofficers-gasenate.htmlofficers-gasenate.html -- which isn't at all what you meant :-) Further, everything after that third forward-slash is ignored, and will probably (read: definitely) produce an error. I see two things that are worth changing here. * you shouldn't be using forward-slashes as the regex delimiter * you should be escaping metacharacters like the dot Thus, the regex should be something like this: s|\./officers-gasenate\.html|http://www\.legis\.state\.ga\.us/cgi-bin/peo_list\.pl\?List=stsenatedl| That's a bit unwieldy; you can break it up for clarity -- my $old = "\./officers-gasenate\.html"; my $new = "http://www\.legis\.state\.ga\.us/cgi-bin/peo_list\.pl\?List=stsenatedl";; s/$old/$new/; -- but for a command-line one-liner, that's probably overkill. Note though that it's standard to point out here that HTML is notoriously difficult to get right with regular expressions. If all you're doing is changing the href target of known anchor tags in a limited set of files that you have control over, it's probably fine to solve it this way, but if the HTML is at all complicated -- that is, if it has any inconsistencies at all, broken tags, etc -- you're much better off solving this kind of problem with a parser module from CPAN. There's a lot of them to choose from, depending on your needs, but almost any of them are a better choice than doing this kind of thing by hand with regular expressions: it's easier, faster, and more robust. Keep it in mind if this problem starts getting more complicated... -- Chris Devers -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
