Thanks for the suggestions in response to Having scalars handled as regexs inside a substitution... unfortunately none of them worked the way I had hoped they would. Fortunately I've given you some sample code to dissect.

I'm working on some code that will allow arbitrary textual substitutions on anything that is outside of a given set of blocks ie... outside of <CODE>.*?<\CODE;> or outside of HTML tags. The first reason I want this is to split up long words in the chatterbox without breaking URLS.

So here's some test code I've been playing with. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $string="realllylongstringthatrefusestoend".
" <A HREF=\"http://perlmonks.org/images/blah/blah/blah\">\n";
print splitter($string,"<.*?>","\S{18}","$1 ");
sub splitter{
    my($string,$spliton,$find,$replace)=@_;
   my @array=split(/$spliton/,$string);
    my $i=0;
    my @splitters;
    my $str;
    while($string=~/($spliton)/g){
        push @splitters,$1;
    }
    for(@array){

        #none of these work
       #s/$find/$replace/eeg;               
        #s/$find/$1 /g;
        #eval '$string' . " =~ s/$find/$replace/";

        #this works
        s/(\S{18})/$1 /g;
        $str.=$array[$i];
        $str.=$splitters[$i];
        $i++;
    }
    $str;
}

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In reply to Handling scalars as regexs within a substitution. (Take 2) by vroom

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