This smells a lot like homework, so I'm not posting a full answer -- hints only!

Heh - well, not really, since I already have a solution.

It was just that I was curious to see if such a task could be handled with a single regex, or whether my instinct to break the job into seperate regexes was correct.

Thanks to all for input - it looks like my original instinct was correct. Other solutions exist (of course - hey, it's perl), but split is inconvenient, since I'd need to rejoin later. Maybe it would be a little faster - I dunno - but (high) speed isn't really an issue with this particular job.

Once again, thanks to all, and if someone does come up a single regex, I'd still be curious to see it.

Here, btw, is the full code I'm using - if anyone notices anything dangerous or just plain silly, feel free to comment. Always happy to learn.

use strict;

open(IN, $ARGV[0])||die "Cannot open $ARGV[0] for read:$!\n";
my @lines = <IN>;
close IN||die "Cannot close $ARGV[0]:$!\n";
open(OUT, ">$ARGV[0]")||die "Cannot open $ARGV[0] for write:$!\n";
foreach(@lines){
  if(m/(^OBX\|)([^\|]*\|){2}([^\^]*)(.*$)/){
    my $pre = $1 . $2;
    my $read = $3;
    my $post = $4;
    $read =~ s/[A-Z]/U$&/g;
    $read =~ s/[a-z]/L$&/g;
    $_ = $pre . $read . $post;
  }
  print OUT||die "Cannot write to $ARGV[0]:$!\n";
}
close OUT||die "Cannot close $ARGV[0]:$!\n";

[download]
Tom Melly, tom@tomandlu.co.uk

In reply to Re^2: Can anyone make this regex job neater? by Melly
in thread Can anyone make this regex job neater? by Melly

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