Question

I am trying to replace a string with another string, but the greedy nature doesn’t seem to be working for me. Below is my code where “PERFORM GET-APLCY” is identified and replaced properly, but string “PERFORM GET-APLCY-SOI-CVG-WVR” and many other such strings are being replaced by the the replacement string for “PERFORM GET-APLCY”.

s/PERFORM $func[$i]\.*/#  PERFORM $func[$i]\.\n $hash{$func[$i]}/g;

where the full stop is optional during string match and replacement. I have also tried giving the pattern to be matched as $func[$i]\b
Please help me understand what the issue could be.

Thanks in advance,
Faez

Answer 1

Why GET-APLCY- should not match GET-APLCY., if the dot is optional?

Easy solution: sort your array by length in descending order.

@func = sort { length $b <=> length $a } @func

Testing script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature 'say';

my %hash = ('GET-APLCY'              => 'REP1',
            'GET-APLCY-SOI-CVG-WVR'  => 'REP2',
            'GET-APLCY-SOI-MNG-CVRW' => 'REP3',
           );

my @func = sort { length $b <=> length $a } keys %hash;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    print;
    print "\t -> \t";
    for my $i (0 .. $#func) {
        s/$func[$i]/$hash{$func[$i]}/;
    }
    say;
}

__DATA__
GET-APLCY param
GET-APLCY- param
GET-APLCY. param
GET-APLCY-SOI. param
GET-APLCY-SOI-CVG-WVR param
GET-APLCY-SOI-MNG-CVRW param