Question

I have a string

[something]text1[/something] blah blah [something]text2[/something]

I need to write a Perl script to read what is in the [something] tag, process it to “text-x”, and put it back with an [otherthing] tag. So the above string should be

[otherthing]text-1[/otherthing] blah blah [otherthing]text-2[/otherthing]

Processing “textx” to “text-x” is not one step process.

So this is solution that I have till now:

m/[something](?<text>.*)[/something]/

This will get me the string in between and I can process that to “text-x” but how do I put it back in the same place with [otherthing]text-x[/otherthing]?

1. How do I use s/// in this case?
2. How to do it for the whole string one by one ?

Answer 1

You can use the /e switch on s/// to evaluate the right hand side before using the result as the substitution, and the /g flag to do this for every match.

Here is a simple example:

use 5.12.0;

my $str = ">1<  >2<  >34<";

$str =~ s/>(\d+)</">>".process("$1")."<<"/eg;

say $str;

sub process {
    return "x" x $_[0];
}