Re^4: Inherited a perl script...need help (s///)

I tried the code Stevie gave me, but it did the same thing my original code was doing. It found any match of 4 digits and replaced it with 9999. This led me to a way of patching the issue and fixing it in a text editor using block selection. Replacing 0030 with AAAA, replacing 0031 with BBBB ect ect. Basically I need the code to match the 4 character number and replace with a 4 character number. Any numbers of more or less character in a field should be ignored. I hope this helps clarify. My code that I used to clunk my way through the issue.

$line =~ s/0030/AAAA/g;
        $line =~ s/0031/BBBB/g;
        $line =~ s/0884/CCCC/g;
        $line =~ s/0716/DDDD/g;
        $line =~ s/0528/EEEE/g;
[download]

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Re^5: Inherited a perl script...need help (s///) by blindluke (Hermit) on Nov 11, 2015 at 21:45 UTC
It's still hard to guess what you need, but try this: `s/(?<![0-9])\d{4}(?![0-9])/9999/g` [download] It replaces all numbers that are exactly four digits long with 9999. - Luke	[reply] [d/l]
Re^5: Inherited a perl script...need help (s///) by Preceptor (Deacon) on Nov 12, 2015 at 22:50 UTC
Bear in mind that a sed style pattern replace like that is a substring match. So it will _also_ match longer numbers of which that's a substring. You need to anchor it - either with lookaround (which restricts a pattern from matching based on what happens before/after it) - or you can match on something like `\b` which is a word boundary.	[reply] [d/l]