On Jan 1, 2008 4:20 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi there, > > I'm quite new to perl, and now having problem with using parentheses > in translation strings. For example, I want to replace the 4 digit > year code 'yyyy' with '(\d\d\d\d)', so it can be used for grouping in > string matching later. I expected the code would be like: > > $org_str =~ tr/yyyy/\(\d\d\d\d\)/; > > Then the result is '(((('. It seems the parens were not escaped > properly, shouldn't the backslash escape the round brackets? If I > remove the backslashes before brackets, the result is the same. If I > use double backslashes, that is, \\(\d\d\d\d\\), the result is '\\\\'. > Can someone inform the right way to do this? Many thanks in > advance! :-) snip
You want substitute (s///) not transliterate (tr///). The s/// operator takes a regex in the first part and replaces what martches in the target string it with the string in the second part. The tr/// operator replaces the any character in the first argument with the corresponding character from the second argument in the target string. So you should be using $org_str =~ s/yyyy/(\\d\\d\\d\\d)/; -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/