Hi, I have a file that I've overtly replaced certain text with a | to assist in loading the file into a table. As the last field could contain actual |'s as part of a command sequence, I want to replace any |'s after the 9th occurrence with the word pipe to load into a varchar field. It works for the 10th occurrence but somehow skips over the 11th and treats the 12th as the 11th. I.e, "|some command with the 10th | along with the 11th | along with the 12th |" results in "|some command with the 10th pipe along with the 11th | along with the 12th pipe " Is there something inherent with my approach that is unable to accurately determine the 11th occurrence of a |?...a humble novice. 

 
open($fh, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $outfilename) or die "Could not open fi
+le '$outfilename' $!";  # open the file that had 9 |'s overtly set.
open(OUT, ">$outfileload") or die "Unable to open $outfilename for wri
+ting: $!\n";  

# replace the 10th, 11th, and 12th |'s with  pipe so the field can be 
+loaded into an expanded varchar field without treating the data as mo
+re than one field.
while ($row = <$fh>) {
my $pos1 = 10;
    $row =~ s/(\|)/!--$pos1 ? ' pipe ' : $1/ge;
my $pos2 = 11;
    $row =~ s/(\|)/!--$pos2 ? ' pipe ' : $1/ge;
my $pos3 = 12;
    $row =~ s/(\|)/!--$pos3 ? ' pipe ' : $1/ge;
    chomp $row;
    print OUT "$row\n";
    }
print "doneagain\n";

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In reply to replace nth occurrence of | by perl197

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