Easy one for my fellow Monks

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Easy one for my fellow Monks by Chmrr (Vicar) on Dec 20, 2001 at 02:26 UTC
This is because the open paren has a special meaning in regular expressions -- it tells Perl that you may want to talk about whatever ends up matching between the parens later. Because you want a literal paren, you need to escape it. Try `s/\(/,(/;` perl -pe '"I lo`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'	[reply] [d/l]
(shockme) Re: Re: Easy one for my fellow Monks by shockme (Chaplain) on Dec 20, 2001 at 03:14 UTC
Q: Why wouldn't it be s/\(/,\(/; ? Don't you have to escape the second open paren as well? If things get any worse, I'll have to ask you to stop helping me.	[reply]
(tye)Re: Easy one for my fellow Monks by tye (Sage) on Dec 20, 2001 at 03:22 UTC
Parens are special characters to regular expressions. Only the first part of s/// is a regular expression. The replacement part is a string. Parens aren't special in strings (though $ and @ are, for example, so you'd have to escape those if you wanted a literal $ or @). - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]
Re: Easy one for my fellow Monks by Anonymous Monk on Dec 20, 2001 at 04:27 UTC
You must escape parens and these \, \|, [, {, ^, $, *, +, ?, . $input =~ s/$/,$/; remember to use a /g at the end to match multiple times on one line.	[reply]
Re: Re: Easy one for my fellow Monks by grep (Monsignor) on Dec 20, 2001 at 07:29 UTC
If you are doing several metachars you can also use \Q to quote your metachars. `$var =~ s#\Q(#,(#;` [download] or `$var =~ s#\Q([]\E#/meta/;` [download] /Q will quote all the metachars it sees in a regex until \E.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Easy one for my fellow Monks by ddrumguy (Acolyte) on Dec 20, 2001 at 20:31 UTC
THANK YOU ALL ! works like a charm - you guys were very helpful. Someday I will be better at this - (only been doin Perl for a few weeks now). thanks again bob	[reply]