I have a string of html select options that looks like $selection in the code below. I have a variable $value might be in the list of html options in the form of $value--$hidden_value. If $value matches like in the code below I would like to 'preselect' the html select box for the user. The following code works, however it is not the way I was trying to do it. I was trying to use one regular expression instead of two like in $selection2, using a sub match $2 to just modify "> to be " selected > in place if $value matched before. How this possible? I have several perl books I have been looking in the camel book around page 200, as well as modern perl and on line did not come up with anything that worked better yet (but I did get this far) Thanks in advance! 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my ($selection,$selection2,$selection3,$value,$t2);
$value = "13gr";
print "regex question: How do I modify in place in only one character 
+class?\n";

$selection = qq|
<option value="000-F--10180">000-F
<option value="11EG--10181">11EG
<option value="12160--10182">12160
<option value="12164--10185">12164
<option value="12170--10186">12170
<option value="12216--12216">12216
<option value="12330--12330">12330
<option value="12480--12480">12480
<option value="12484--12484">12484
<option value="12488--12488">12488
<option value="12534--12534">12534
<option value="12756--12756">12756
<option value="12760--12760">12760
<option value="12764--12764">12764
<option value="12813--12813">12813
<option value="12A--10983">12A
<option value="12B--10987">12B
<option value="12BB--10347">12BB
<option value="12D--10993">12D
<option value="12ea--10376">12ea
<option value="12JI--10438">12JI
<option value="12NO--10242">12NO
<option value="13gr--11117">13gr
<option value="2--2--11070">2--2
<option value="22QS--33337">22QS
<option value="22WO--55555">22WO
<option value="22WO.1--64444">22WO.1
|;
$selection2 = $selection ;
$selection3 = $selection ;
$selection =~ s/(\Q$value\E)/$1 selected/ ;

$selection2 =~ s/((?:.*?($value)){2}).*(\">)// ;

$selection3 =~ s/(?:.*?($value)){2}// ;
my $t3 = $&;

#print "Matches: $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7\n";

($t2 = $t3) =~ s/(\">)/\" selected >/ ;
$selection3 .= $t2 ;

print "3: $selection3\n\n";

print "value $value\n"

[download]
PS the above code is just a mockup just for an example

In reply to regex question: How do I modify in place in only one character class? by aturtle

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