You actually have two problems. First, regexes don't work on arrays directly. Second, a substitution (s///) returns the number of substitutions made. You don't want $term = s/$full/$abb/g, because the = will assign that count to $term. You want =~ which means "make this regex act on" (sort of).

This could be easily fixed by slurping, rather than reading your IN into an array. 

# instead of @myin = <IN>;
my $myin;
{
   local $/ = undef;
   $myin = <IN>; #slurp all to scalar
}

#instead of print "@myin\n"; @myin = s/$full/$abb/g;
print "$myin\n";
$myin =~ s/\b$full\b/abb/g

[download]
Update:benizi pointed out my foolishness in capturing word boundaries. The sad thing is, I knew that and did it anyway. That's like the fourth really dumb thing I've done today. Sigh. Thanks, benizi!

I took the liberty of capturingmatching word boundaries (\b) and adding them back ($1 and $2), since without that code, you'd replace too much. For example, trying to replace all occurances of 'hello' with 'hi', you'd change 'Othello' into 'Othi'. ;-) Checking for word boundaries should help with that.

<-radiant.matrix->
A collection of thoughts and links from the minds of geeks
The Code that can be seen is not the true Code
"In any sufficiently large group of people, most are idiots" - Kaa's Law

In reply to Re: find and replace by radiantmatrix
in thread find and replace by texuser74

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