Re: Control Characters (\xNN) in HTML

Like tommyw and scain said, you have to escape the backslash. Also, I don't think \d matches hex digits 'A'-'F'. If you need to match those (looks like you do from the sprintf), you can use [[:xdigit:]] instead.

s/\\x([[:xdigit:]]+)/'&#'.hex($1).';'/eg

Btw, if you only want 2 digits (so that stuff like "\x92Efficiency" doesn't confuse the regex), use {2} instead of +. If you want to match one or two, use {1,2}. You're probably better off matching an exact number rather than a range though if you can.

s/\\x([[:xdigit:]]{2})/'&#'.hex($1).';'/eg

Hope this helps!

Update: Oops, I just read your reply to tommyw above. All you need is a range, combined with ord (not hex).

s/([\x80-\xFF])/'&#'.ord($1).';'/eg

Comment on Re: Control Characters (\xNN) in HTML

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Re: Re: Control Characters (\xNN) in HTML by tommyw (Hermit) on Oct 18, 2001 at 22:24 UTC
Pah! Updating your answer based on a reply to my message. Are there no depths to the plagarism people will stoop to? :-) In an attempt to retaliate, allow me to offer: `s/([^[:print:]])/'&#'.ord($1).';'/eg` [download] in return.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Control Characters (\xNN) in HTML by garliqua (Novice) on Oct 21, 2001 at 02:51 UTC
Thanks to everyone who replied. I appreciate it. I ended up going with blackmateria's solution: `s/([\x80-\xFF])/'&#'.ord($1).';'/eg` Since it kept the scope of the substitutions neatly to just the things I wanted to replace (as opposed to tommyw's followup using `[:print:]`, which—as I understand it from page 80 of the owl book, at least—would have performed replacements on tabs and other non-space-character whitespace as well). Thanks again to all y'all!	[reply] [d/l] [select]