Hi folks,

This seems like it should be simple, but I've been struggling with it for a while now. I want to use a regex to substitute a variable declaration in a paragraph with it's value. If I have text like:

my $text = "Your child #child_name# is invited to come to our school. 
+Your child's teacher will be #teacher_name#, and the class is held in
+ room #room_number.";

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Then I should be able to do something like (I know this is not correct!): 
$text =~ s/\#\w+\#/$hash{$&}/g)

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Which would result in rows like: Your child Peter is invited...

I know there is a way to do this, but it seems like I have to do two substitutions here - one to substitute #variable_name# to variable_name, then variable_name to $hash{variable_name}. But I can't for the life of me find an example that does this (substitutions within substitutions). Regex's have always kinda stymied me. I did want to solve this with a regex - I'd rather not have to use split, or other methods (which I guess I could). But any example would be helpful.

Thanks for any help!

In reply to regex substitution by michellem

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