Sorry for posting such a simple problem but I've read through the Camel section on pattern matching, tried several things yet I can't seem to figure this out.

I have pipe delimited text data and I want to ensure that there is a at least one spaces between each pipe (I don't want to add any spaces to fields containing data). E.g., what I want is:

| | | | |
| | | |red| |
|blue| | |green| |
[download]

My current code looks like this:

use strict;

while (<DATA>) {
   s/\|\|/\| \|/g;
   print;
}

__DATA__
|||||
||||red||
|blue|||green||
[download]

and produces the following output:

| || ||
| || |red| |
|blue| ||green| |
[download]

I realize that I can just execute the regex twice to get the desired results but that seems ugly. There must be something simple that I'm overlooking or don't understand. Any hints or pointers welcome. Thanks.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.