in reply to Viewing metasymbols in output?

Well, it sounds like what you want is the Symbol view (or whatever it's called) in a wordprocessor. You can write a quick Perl script to convert a text file into that. Use something like: 
    local $\ = '';
    my $filename = "/mydir/myfile";
    open FILE, "<$filename"
        or die "Cannot open $filename for reading\n";
    my $file = <FILE>;
    close FILE;

    $file =~ s/\t/\\t/g;

    open FILE, ">$outfilename"
        or die "Cannot open $outfilename for writing\n";
    print FILE $file;
    close FILE;

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And do that substitution like for every metacharacter you want to replace.

The reason to use s/// instead of tr/// is that you are replacing in a 1:n relationship and not the 1:1 that tr requires.

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Re: Re: Viewing metasymbols in output?
by Hofmator (Curate) on Aug 07, 2001 at 19:52 UTC

    or in one line: perl -pe 's/\t/\\t/g' infile > outfile to allow for more substitutions consider a hash like 

    my %mapping = ( # or whatever you like to display
  "\t" => '\t',
  "\n" => '\n',
  " "  => '_',
);

my $pattern = qr/([@{[join '', keys %mapping]}])/;

while ( <> ) {
  s/$pattern/$mapping{$1}/g;
  print "$_\n"; # you still want to start a new line
}

    [download]
    This works fine as long as your keys are only characters, otherwise you have to use an alternation instead of a character class.

    -- Hofmator

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