Like swiftone said, for the general case you really want a full-blown parser. But if you can narrow the possibilities, a regex solution may work.

My first assumption would be that all the print statements you want to eliminate are contained in a single line. This seems to be the case from your example. In this case, I would suggest processing line-by-line instead of joining the whole thing in a single string and processing that.

My second assumption would be that the prints you want to eliminate will have one of the following forms: 

print "string"
print("string")
print HANDLE "string"
print(HANDLE "string")

[download]
where spacing can be arbitrary, handles are always all-uppercase, and the string does not contain double quotes.

Given this, I would do something like the following: 

while(<FILE>) {
  s/print(\s+|\s*\(\s*)([A-Z]+\s+)?"string"(\s*\))?/1/;
  print;
}

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This is untested. Notice that I am substituting the print statement with a 1, so that it does not break things like: 
print "string" if (somecond)       becomes 1 if (somecond)
something if print HANDLE "string"         something if 1
etc.

[download]

--ZZamboni

In reply to RE: A Reg Exp Question by ZZamboni
in thread A Reg Exp Question by Anonymous Monk

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