Monks,

I'm looking for a better way to do the following... 

my $name = "Rob J Anderson";
my $squished_name = $name;  # this is the line i don't like.
$squished_name =~ s/\W//g;

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Now this is a trivial example, and the actual regex doesn't matter. The point here is that I often find myself doing a substitution like this with a regex, and I don't like having to create a copy of the variable first, because I'm forced to initially assign it with a value that clearly isn't squished. In fact, 'don't like' isn't close, I really hate bad variables names.

So what I'm looking for is a idiom for performing a translation on a variable, leaving the original variable intact, and returning the translated value.

Thanks, Rob

In reply to Idiom for a regex translation by reasonablekeith

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