Question

I am unable to avoid the comment lines(lines starting with *) for parsing during string replacement in a file. Please help me with my code.

`perl -pi.bak -e "$_ =~/[#.*]*/; /s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT STRING/g" Test.txt`;

Am using Perl in Eclipse,Windows XP.

I get the following Error message:

Number found where operator expected at -e line 6, near "*    LAST UPDATED 09/15"
(Might be a runaway multi-line // string starting on line 1)
(Missing operator before 15?)
Bareword found where operator expected at -e line 6, near "1994 AT"
(Missing operator before AT?)

Thanks in Advance,
Perl Newbie

Answer 1

use next to skip the following code if you match a comment:

perl -i.back -p -e'next if /^#/; s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT STRING/' Test.txt

update: now as choroba suggested, instead of launching a separate instance of Perl and having to deal with quotes, you should probably have the whole thing in your main code:

my $file= 'Test.txt';
my $bak= "$file.bak";

rename $file, $bak or die "cannot rename $file into $bak: $!";;

open( my $in,  '<', $bak)  or die "cannot open $bak: $!";
open( my $out, '>', $file) or die "cannot create $file: $!";

while( <$in>)
  { if( ! /^\*/) # note the backslash here, * is a meta character
      { s/PERFORM \Q$func[5]\E\[\.\]*/# PERFORM $func[5]\.\n $hash{$func[5]}/g; }
    print {$out} $_;
  }
close $in; 
close $out;

Note that $func[5] can (potentially) includes meta-characters, so I used \Q and \E to escape them.

I am not sure about the \[\.\]* part, which as written matches a square bracket, a dot, and 0 or more closing square brackets: [., [.], or [.]]. I suspect that’s not what you want.