Home/ Questions/Q 938455
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-15T21:38:51+00:00

I am modifying some HTML pages and want to increase the font size dynamically

  • 0

I am modifying some HTML pages and want to increase the font size dynamically with a regex. In my script below, I want the ‘8’ and ‘3’ to turn into ‘9’ and ‘4’ but I get ‘8++’ and ‘3++’, respectively. I have the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple;

my $content = "<TD><FONT STYLE=\"font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif\" SIZE=\"8\">this is just a bunch of text</FONT></TD>";
$content .= "<TD><FONT STYLE=\"font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif\" SIZE=\"3\">more text</FONT></TD>";

$content=~s/SIZE="(\d+)">/SIZE="$1++">/g;

print $content;
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ll just skip the part about how regexps are a bad way to parse HTML, because sometimes a quick-and-dirty solution is good enough.

    You can’t use an operator inside a string like that. The ++ is just treated as plain text (as you found). You have to use the /e flag to indicate that the replacement should be evaluated as Perl code, and then use the appropriate expression, like:

    $content =~ s/SIZE="(\d+)">/'SIZE="' . ($1 + 1) . '">'/eg;

    You can’t use $1++ for two reasons. First, it would do the increment after returning the value, so you’d be replacing 8 with 8 instead of 9. Second, $1 is a read-only value, and the increment would want to modify it.

    • 0