I have got a highly complex, nested XML document in encoding ISO-8859-1 which contains abbreviations.

Each abbreviation has two to three letters and each letter is directly followed by a full stop. The separator between each letter plus full stop might be

You could define this as a regex: a-zA-Z\.((!!!emsp14;|!!!hairsp;|\s)?a-zA-Z)+

I would like to wrap each abbreviation into an element <abbrev> and unify the separator whitespace to "!!!hairsp;"

This looks pretty easy, but there are some nasty pitfalls:
If two abbreviations are adjacent to each other, the problem of proper segmentation pops up. For example the string "a. A. z. B." could lead to <abbrev>a.!!!hairsp;A.!!!hairsp;z.</abbrev> which doesn't exist. The correct solution would be <abbrev>a.!!!hairsp;A.</abbrev>_<abbrev>z.!!!hairsp;B.</abbrev> where the underscore stands for a space.

Another issue is the full stop at the end of a sentence and a following abbreviation:
"Hier müssen die richtigen Regeln einbezogen werden. Z.B. ist hier § 42 ...". Of course, there exists no abbreviation "n. Z.B.", but the proper tagging would be: "Hier müssen die richtigen Regeln einbezogen werden. <abbrev>Z.!!!hairsp;B.</abbrev> ist hier § 42 ...".

As the regex captures abbreviations with 2 letters and with 3 letters, it has to be taken care that a 3 letter abbreviation such as "m.w.N." won't be split into a two letter abbreviation "m.w." followed by "N."

I suppose that you will need a kind of knowledge base in your script for the proper segmentation, but I don't know how to do that.

The easy solution would be a bunch of changes:

!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;


# for interactive mode
my $infile = $ARGV[0];
my $outfile = $ARGV[1];  

open(IN, '<' .  $infile) or die $!;
open(OUT, '>' . $outfile) or die $!;

while(<IN>)
{
    
    # wrap "a.A."
    $_ =~ s[a\.!!!hairsp;A\.](<abbrev n='2'>a.!!!hairsp;A.</abbrev>)g;
    $_ =~ s[a\.!!!emsp14;A\.](<abbrev n='2'>a.!!!hairsp;A.</abbrev>)g;
+   
    $_ =~ s[a\.\sA\.](<abbrev n='2'>a.!!!hairsp;A.</abbrev>)g;
    $_ =~ s[a\.A\.](<abbrev n='2'>a.!!!hairsp;A.</abbrev>)g;
    # wrap "a.F."
    $_ =~ s[a\.!!!hairsp;F\.](<abbrev n='2'>a.!!!hairsp;F.</abbrev>)g;
    $_ =~ s[a\.!!!emsp14;F\.](<abbrev n='2'>a.!!!hairsp;F.</abbrev>)g;
+   
    $_ =~ s[a\.\sF\.](<abbrev n='2'>a.!!!hairsp;F.</abbrev>)g;
    $_ =~ s[a\.F\.](<abbrev n='2'>a.!!!hairsp;F.</abbrev>)g;
    # wrap "d.h."
    $_ =~ s[d\.!!!hairsp;h\.](<abbrev n='2'>d.!!!hairsp;h.</abbrev>)g;
    $_ =~ s[d\.!!!emsp14;h\.](<abbrev n='2'>d.!!!hairsp;h.</abbrev>)g;
+   
    $_ =~ s[d\.\sh\.](<abbrev n='2'>d.!!!hairsp;h.</abbrev>)g;
    $_ =~ s[d\.h\.](<abbrev n='2'>d.!!!hairsp;h.</abbrev>)g;
    # wrap "D.h."
    $_ =~ s[D\.!!!hairsp;h\.](<abbrev n='2'>D.!!!hairsp;h.</abbrev>)g;
    $_ =~ s[D\.!!!emsp14;h\.](<abbrev n='2'>D.!!!hairsp;h.</abbrev>)g;
+   
    $_ =~ s[D\.\sh\.](<abbrev n='2'>D.!!!hairsp;h.</abbrev>)g;
    $_ =~ s[D\.h\.](<abbrev n='2'>D.!!!hairsp;h.</abbrev>)g;
    
    print OUT $_;
}

close(IN);
close(OUT);

[download]

Do you see a more efficient solution? And if yes, could you kindly show me how this would look like?

In reply to wrap abbreviations in XML element by LexPl

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