Question

I’m trying to find some text in an XML file and delete only a part of a line that has it.
I found this format to try: perl -p -i -e "s/$1/$2/g" $3 after some code searches.

So I’m using this code:

perl -p -i.bak -e "s/\'../../../specialText/\'//g" "C:/box/fileName.XML";

What I want to do is delete everything from the inner single quotes as in:
‘../../../specialText/’, but using q() or \’ to escape the quote doesn’t work and I’m not sure the ..’s aren’t messing things up either. I’m guessing that not putting anything in as a text replacement will delete it properly, but I’m not sure.

The errors are:

1. Backslash found where operator expected at -e line 1, near “/specialText/\”

2. (Missing operator before \?)
   syntax error at -e line 1, near “/specialText/\”

3. Can’t find string terminator “‘” anywhere before EOF at -e line 1.

How do rewrite this one liner to accomplish this?

This works.

C:\box>perl -p -i.bak -e s/Copyright/bar/g Test.txt

I tried it on another file, so now I just have to play with it to modify my original.

Answer 1

And what’s wrong with using another set of delimiters?

perl -p -i.bak -e "s{'../../../specialText/'}{}g" "C:/box/fileName.XML"