Hello talexb,

From the end of perlop#Regexp-Quote-Like-Operators:

Occasionally, you can't use just a /g to get all the changes to occur that you might want. Here are two common cases:

    # put commas in the right places in an integer
    1 while s/(\d)(\d\d\d)(?!\d)/$1,$2/g;

    # expand tabs to 8-column spacing
    1 while s/\t+/' ' x (length($&)*8 - length($`)%8)/e;
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(Note that the /g modifier in the first example isn’t actually needed.) You can adapt this approach to your requirements:

my $foo = ':{,"';
1 while $foo =~ s/([:,{])(?! )(.)/$1 $2/;
print ">$foo<\n";
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Output:

19:22 >perl 1872_SoPW.pl
>: { , "<

19:22 >
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Hope that’s of interest,