I am trying to remove certain words from a document. The document is stored in a database and the list of offending words is stored in a text file.

I have managed to open the words file and get them into an array and also get the document assigned to a variable.

What I'd like to do next (unless there is a better way of doing it!) is loop thru the list of bad words and replace them with '' (squat).. thus


    $data = "DOCUMENT EXTRACTED FROM DB"; // etc

    open(WORDS, "commonwords.txt") || die ("Could not open common word
+s file");
    @stop_words = <WORDS>;
    close(WORDS);

    $_ = $data;
    foreach $stopword(@stop_words){
     $data =~ ### DO SUBSTITUTION HERE
    }

[download]


I'm going to have to remove some punctuation such as ,. etc and HTML tags too before putting every word in the document into an index.

- any advice greatly appreciated.

Stew, novice

In reply to Using a variable as pattern in substitution by stew

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