Question

is there a string in regular expressions that can instruct it to autoincrement it’s replacements, whether they be numbers or letters.

Thank you

for instance, I have strings that should be number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 but they are currently numbered as 1, 1, 1, 1, 1

how would I replace the number in those 5 individual similar strings to be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Answer 1

I’m not familiar with the syntax of TextWrangler; however, it uses pcre so this should be what you want as long as you have a way to assign an initial value to your incrementing variable (in this case, I use $ii)… the script below replaces any occurrence of “pizza-x” with “pizza-0”, “pizza-1″…

@foo = ('pizza', 'pizza-a', 'pizza-b', 'pizza-c');
$ii = 0;
foreach (@foo) {
    $_ =~ s/(pizza-)[a-z]/"$1".$ii++/e;
    print "$_\n";
}

Results…

[mpenning@mpenning-t60 Desktop]$ perl foo.pl 
pizza
pizza-0
pizza-1
pizza-2

The magic comes from s///e; and $ii++; be sure you enclose the non-incrementing string in quotes and concatenate with a period.

Alternatively, just do your auto-increment mangling with perl -pi -e '$ii = 0; s/something/"here".$ii++/e ` directly on the text file (make a backup copy first, of course).