Question

I would like to use this:

perl -pi -e 's/^(.*)$/\"$1\",/g' /path/to/your/file

for adding ” at beginning of line and “, at end of each line in text file. The problem is that some lines are just empty lines and I don’t want these to be altered. Any ideas how to modify above code or maybe do it completely differently?

Answer 1

Others have already answered the regex syntax issue, let’s look at that style.

s/^(.*)$/\"$1\",/g

This regex suffers from “leaning toothpick syndrome” where /// makes your brain bleed.

s{^ (.+) $}{ "$1", }x;

Use of balanced delimiters, the /x modifier to space things out and elimination of unnecessary backwhacks makes the regex far easier to read. Also the /g is unnecessary as this regex is only ever going to match once per line.