Hello Chris Daniel, and welcome to the Monastery!

Please note that your requirement as stated is self-contradictory. I assume you don’t want to remove the entity &#38. In which case, you can use a negative lookahead assertion to ensure that the entity to be removed is not immediately followed by another digit:

20:54 >perl -wE "my $x = '<Remarks>1 SW PLT SLAC 6 PCS &#3</Remarks>';
+ $x =~ s/&#\d(?!\d)//g; say $x;"
<Remarks>1 SW PLT SLAC 6 PCS </Remarks>

20:54 >perl -wE "my $x = '<Remarks>1 SW PLT SLAC 6 PCS &#38</Remarks>'
+; $x =~ s/&#\d(?!\d)//g; say $x;"
<Remarks>1 SW PLT SLAC 6 PCS &#38</Remarks>

20:54 >

[download]

See “Lookaround Assertions” in perlre#Extended-Patterns.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re: Need a regex to replace incomplete html entities by Athanasius
in thread Need a regex to replace incomplete html entities by Chris Daniel

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.