That's all good advice, but I'd make some corrections / improvements to your regexp.

One thing that you should be doing is using \Q and \E in your replacement. That is, you want to be replacing a literal abbreviation, not an abreviation-pattern. Also, you should limit that ".*". Granted, ".*?" would be good enough for most people, but I prefer to be explicit. Additionally, there is no reason to catch the latter half of the word being abreviated (so, drop the parenthesese). Last of all, you probably want to perform this replacement as many times as it occurs, so add a /g modifier: 

    $str =~ s/<\Q$abbr\E[^>]*>/<$abbr­>/g;

[download]

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In reply to Re: Re: replacing strings using reg exp by etcshadow
in thread replacing strings using reg exp by Anonymous Monk

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