PDF::Create is no longer supported? That's too bad, I recently used it for a project and it worked well. I even added some commands myself, to support color.

Anyway: PDF is based on Postscript. In PostScript, the string delimiters are parens. That's the cause of the problems, and why it doesn't break with brackets and braces. The way around it, is to escape the parens, any parens, if PDF supports it, with a backslash. The backslash itself must be special, too.

Let me pull in the PDF docs, from PDFReference.pdf:

3.2.3 String objects — literal strings
Any characters may appear in a string except unbalanced parentheses and the backslash,which must be treated specially. Balanced pairs of parentheses within a string require no special treatment.
The "special treatment" is pretty much as in Perl: preceding each special non-word character with a backslash; newline can be represented by "\n" and a tab with "\t". No surprise there. And finally, you can use octal representation with 3 digits, again, just like in Perl: "\ddd".

That should be enough to get you on your way, I suppose. You can check the table at page 30 from the above PDF file (warning: huge file: 9MB), that is the 50th page in the document.

p.s. It seems that quite a few people are rather fond of this module, including myself. If the original author is no longer interested in supporting it, perhaps somebody else should pick it up. How does one go about, in order to do that? (BTW the best place to escape the backslashes and the parens, would be in the module.)

In reply to Re: How do I replace certain character if condition exists by bart
in thread How do I replace certain character if condition exists by peppiv

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