Question

I’m trying to find a way to replace spaces and double quotes with pipes (||) while leaving the spaces within the double quotes untouched.

For example, it would make something like ‘word “word word” word’ into ‘word||word word||word’ and another like ‘word word word’ into ‘word||word||word’.

Right now I have this to work off of:

[%- MACRO typestrip(value) PERL -%]
my $htmlVal = $stash->get('value');
$htmlVal =~ s/"/||/g;
print $htmlVal
[%- END -%]

Which handles replacing double quotes with pipes just fine.

I don’t know how simple or complex this should be or if it can even be done, since I have no actual background in programming and, while I have worked with some Perl, it’s never been this kind before, so I apologize if I’m not doing a good job of explaining this.

Answer 1

Seems possible and might be useful if only a regex is applicable:

 $htmlVal =~ s/(?:"([^"]+)"(\s*))|(?:(\S+)(\s*))/($1||$3).($2||$4?'||':'')/eg;

(Might be beautified a bit after closer introspection.)

input:

 my $htmlVal ='word "word word" word';

output:

 word||word word||word

---

Original code has been modified after failing this case:

 my $htmlVal ='word "word word" "word word"';

will now work too:

 word||word word||word word

---

Explanation:

 $htmlVal =~ s/
               (?: " ([^"]+) " (\s*)) # search "abc abc" ($1), End ($2)
               |                      # OR
               (?: (\S+) (\s*))       # abcd ($3), End ($4)
              /
               ($1||$3) . ($2||$4 ? '||' : '') # decide on $1/$2 or $3/$4 
              /exg;

Regards

rbo