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

In the following code, I am inserting 2 tab characters \t\t after every instance where a 2 digit number in a long string is preceded by 2 spaces and followed by a space.
I am using substitution, but wonder if there is a simple one-liner that will add the \t\t for any number between 10 and 99.

$all =~ s/  95 /  95\t\t/g;
$all =~ s/  80 /  80\t\t/g;
$all =~ s/  75 /  75\t\t/g;
$all =~ s/  70 /  70\t\t/g;
$all =~ s/  65 /  65\t\t/g;
$all =~ s/  60 /  60\t\t/g;
$all =~ s/  50 /  50\t\t/g;
$all =~ s/  40 /  40\t\t/g;
$all =~ s/  33 /  33\t\t/g;

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Re: simplifying substitution
by swl (Prior) on Mar 08, 2021 at 07:13 UTC

    Maybe this?

    $all =~ s/  ([1-9][0-9]) /  $1\t\t/g;
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      Maybe my perl version is different, but I can never get away with using actual spaces like that on the match side--I'd have to represent them...something like this:

      $all =~ s/([ ]{2}[1-9][0-9])[ ]/$1\t\t/g;

      If running strictly on English and there were no possibilities or no issue with encountering numbers like '04' which had to be handled differently, the code could be a mite simpler:

      $all =~ s/([ ]{2}\d\d)[ ]/$1\t\t/g;

      Blessings,

      ~Polyglot~

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        Without the /x modifier, a space should match literally. What's the output of 
        perl -lwe 'print qq( $]) =~ s/ /v/r'

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        (use double quotes instead on MSWin)

        map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]
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        Thanks to all of you, for your contributions! Since my script will be dealing strictly with English text, I decided to try "$all =~ s/( {2}\d\d) /$1\t\t/g;" first, and it seems to do the trick!
        Aloha, and stay safe!

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Re: simplifying substitution
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 08, 2021 at 15:19 UTC

    Since you are using at least Perl 5.10, you could do

    s/  [0-9]{2}\K /\t\t/g

    which retains everything before the \K.

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