Maybe I'm just daft tonight, as may be the case at after 1 AM my time. Perl has powerful features in its regex engine. I suggest using them and being done with it. Is there some reason I'm missing that the following doesn't work? 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my %bad_words = (
    'crud' => 'dirt',
        'crap' => 'dung',
        'poo' => 'dung',
        'wanker' => 'fool'
);
my $bad_re = join '|', keys %bad_words;

while ( <DATA> ) {
        s/\b($bad_re)\b/$bad_words{lc($1)}/ieg;
        print;
}
__DATA__
"Wanker!" said I.
"Crap," says Travis.
This is horse poo. Poo, I tell you!
"Poo upon all the crud and crap the wanker could see."

[download]

When I tested this, it did what I think is being sought. Other than the building of the wordlist hash and the displaying (or writing to file, or assigning to a variable) of the changed text, it's just one line outside the loop to get ready for the regex, and one inside the loop to do the work. Here's my output: 

"fool!" said I.
"dung," says Travis.
This is horse dung. dung, I tell you!
"dung upon all the dirt and dung the fool could see."

[download]

There's no need, as far as I can tell, for anything besides search and replace when what's wanted is search and replace.

Update: Looking back at this, the /e on the s/// isn't necessary.



Christopher E. Stith

In reply to Re: Match first word in line fails by mr_mischief
in thread Match first word in line fails by yacoubean

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.