Search and Replace

Upendra has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear All, thank you for reading my post, hopefully someone can shed some light on my issue, I am parasing a txt doc and replacing some text. Lines of text with out the "\" seem to be found and replaced no issues

I have a string like below "Path=S:\2014 March\Test Scenarios\load\2014 March" that contains "\" that slash is an issue.

I am using a simple search and replace line of code

$nExit = s/$sMatchPattern/$sFullReplacementString/;

any thoughts

Thanks in Advance Upendra

Comment on Search and Replace

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Re: Search and Replace by rjt (Curate) on Apr 25, 2014 at 18:28 UTC
By the sounds of your description, `$sMatchPattern` probably contains literal text rather than an actual regular expression pattern, or at least contains a literal `\`. If you are searching for literal text, use the `\Q` and `\E` escapes to tell the regular expression engine to leave the text alone: `$nExit = s/\Q$sMatchPattern\E/$sFullReplacementString/;` You also might be running into problems with escapes in your strings (which we could easily spot if you show your code!) For example: `my $oops = "\tell me something"; # <TAB>ell me something my $ok = '\tell me something'; # tell me something` [download] `use strict; use warnings;` omitted for brevity.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Search and Replace by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Apr 25, 2014 at 18:25 UTC
Saying that something is "an issue" is even less informative than saying it "doesn't work." Please see I know what I mean. Why don't you?. One potential "issue" associated with backslashes is that they are used to introduce escape sequences in double-quoted strings. (The `qq{...}` in the example below is a double-quote like `"..."` used because Windows quotes command-line strings with "s. Please see Quote and Quote-like Operators in perlop.) `c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le "print qq{hi \there \ned!}; print 'bye \there \ned.'; " hi here ed! bye \there \ned.` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Search and Replace by Laurent_R (Canon) on Apr 25, 2014 at 17:53 UTC
Please provide more of your code. We would at least need to know what you have in the `$sMatchPattern` and `$sFullReplacementString` variables. Oh, and please use code tags for code: `<c>` and `</c>`	[reply] [d/l] [select]