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simple regex not so simple (perl)

Hi all,
I am having trouble with a substitution regex.

I have a string where I need all occurrences of certain string replaced with another.

ie replace all [cor] with 

At the moment I have this:

Code:

$search_string = '[cor]';

$replace_string = '<font color="red">';



print $q->br("<br>Searching for $search_string...");



if ($processing_file =~ /\Q$search_string\E/) { 

    print $q->br("Found! Converting..."); 

    $processing_file =~ s/\Q$search_string\E/\Q$replace_string\E/g;

} else { 

    print $q->br("$search_string not found, moving on...");

}

and in a text file of:

Code:

some normal text

[cor] preceding tag should be changed

I get these results:

Code:



some normal text 

\<font\ color\=\"red\"\> preceding tag should be changed

its automatically escaping all the characters I need! How can I get around this? I've been trying for days!

If I escape the < "> characters before I perform the regex, I just get multiple escape characters!

p.s. the \Q and \E modifiers quote whats in the string and it seems to go ok, so thats not the problem I don't think.

confused:

Sorry, I'm not much of a PERL hacker,
but, if you can open the file in vi (or vim),

like this:

vi filename

then enter the following (just copy and paste)
:1,$s/\[cor\]//g
and press <RETURN>

seems to work for me.

Hope this helps.

Hi thanks for the reply,

but its a CGI script that I am building that will get a bunch of search expressions from an array and replace them with the equivalent html, so its got to be automated.
(although the example I gave was a static one, I'll extend it when i get it going!)

Cheers though!

Can you try:
$replace_string = '\'\'';
or
$replace_string = "''";
?

I may be misunderstanding the question, but can you not use something like this?

perl -pi -e 's/[c]//g' $FILENAME

That should replease every occurence of [c] with 

Sorry if i have misunderstood the problem.

-farmerjoe

thanks for the reply also, I just got it actually.

Code:

$search_string = "[cor]";

                $replace_string = "<font color=\"red\">";



                

                print $q->br("<br>Searching for $search_string...");

                                

                if ($processing_file =~ /\Q$search_string\E/) {

                        print $q->br("Found! Converting...");

                        

            $processing_file =~ s/\Q$search_string\E/$replace_string/g;

so i had to escape the quotes in the html and then quote the square brackets! argh!