Question

I am new to perl.

Currently, my task is to loop through all the .htm files in the folder and do two things:

1. Replace all the “.htm” extension to “.xml”
2. Replace all the white space in the file name to underscore.

In my perl script, I put in these two lines:

@pub=`ls $sourceDir | grep '\.htm' | grep -v Default |  head  -550`;
foreach (@pub) {

my $docName = $_;
chomp($docName);

    $docName =~ s/.htm$//g;
    $docName =~ s/ /_/g;
             ....}

$docName is the variable that holds the current full name of the file (including extension). Interestingly, those two $docName replacement statements, at any time, only the above one worked. For example, the example code here, will only replace the extension but leaves out the space, but if I comment out the first, then white space turns into underscore perfectly, but extensions remain “.htm”.

Could experts help me? And could also suggest where I went wrong? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Are you sure that’s all

$docName =~ s/.htm$//g;

is doing?

You need to escape the . and add your replacement string. You also don’t need g since right anchor guarantees it can only happen once.

$docName =~ s/\.htm$/\.xml/;

Other than that, you should be fine.