Update: sorry, I missed jsprat's previous answer, so this post is a poor dupe :-)

this may not be properly what you're looking for, but Dominus's first Quiz of the Week was very similar.

the goal was to:

Write a subroutine, 'subst', which gets a string argument, $s. It should search $s and replace any occurrences of "$1" with the current value of $1, any occurrences of "$2" with the current value of $2, and so on.

For example, if $1, $2, and $3 happen to be "dogs", "fish" and "carrots", then 

        subst('$2, $1 and $3')
should return 
        "fish, dogs, and carrots"
you can find the original question along with MJD's solution and discussion here.

hope this helps (or entertains at least :-).

oh, by the way: Dominus++ for the marvelous QOTW!

cheers,
Aldo

King of Laziness, Wizard of Impatience, Lord of Hubris

In reply to Re: $1 in variable regex replacement string by dada
in thread $1 in variable regex replacement string by dvergin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.