Re: Regular Expression Help?

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 04:35:45PM -0800, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Perl geeks,
>
> I'd like to write a regular expression for the following purpose:
>
> In an incoming string, there are 0-1 instances of each of #NAME,
> #DATE, and #DETAIL. I'd like to replace these labels in the string
> with the contents of their corresponding variable, $ename, $mdate,
> $edetail (which are coming from the database)

> I believe that this is possible to do in a single regular
> expression, but I'm not clear on how. Currently, I'm doing 3
> substitutions, along the lines of:

> $eline =~ s/#NAME/$ename/g;
>
> But that's not very sophisticated and I'd like to improve my use of
> regexp. Suggestions?

IMHO, your current system may be easier to maintain than this:

%replacements = (
'#NAME' => $ename
, '#DATE' => $mdate
, '#DETAIL' => $edetail
);

$eline =~ s/(#NAME|#DATE|#DETAIL)/$replacements{$1}/g;

Or it may not. Anyhow, that's the way I'd set it up if I were
changing it :)

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter david(at)fetter(dot)org http://fetter.org/
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