Hi all, I have a set of strings stored in an array, and I want to apply a number of regex substitutions to them. The substitutions are arbitrary and liable to change to I want to store the actual regexes in an array at the top of the script like so...

@name_regexes = qw(s/UDP/PLOP/);

I know theres only one substitution in the above array, but the points is I can't get the following to work: 

  foreach $string (@strings) {
    
    # Apply each regex
    foreach $regex (@name_regexes) {
      
      $name =~ $regex;
      push(@names, $name);
    }
  }

Nothing happens... the string remains untransformed... btw, the @names array that is pushed is to store the transformed strings. The following works fine but is not generic enough as I want to specify regular expressions as I showed earlier:

$name =~ $regex; #is replaced by the following line
$name =~ s/UDP/PLOP/;

So my hunch is that is the storing of an entire regex in a string that is the problem - i don't think it is being interpretted by Perl properly... does anyone know/had this problem and how I can fix it??

Best wishes, Arun

In reply to Storing Regular Expressions as Strings in Array?? by arunhorne

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