Hello,

I have unstructured strings which contain ID reference numbers inline. A reference number is made up of between 3-5 digits i.e 200, 50210, 121, 3222 etc.

What I would like to do is change all of the numbers into hyperlinks; to the URL lookup.cgi?id=XXXXX.

I tried doing a match to extract the numbers, then a substitution to replace - this works fine, except that as the URL also contains a number of 3-5digits in length, this screws the substitution.

sub Linker {
    
    ($mystring)=@_;
        
    @myarray = ($mystring =~ m/(\d\d\d+)/g);

    foreach $a (@myarray){
    
        $url = "<b><a href='lookup.cgi?id=$a'>$a</a></b>";
    
        $mystring=~s/$a/$url/g;
            
    }
    
    return $mystring;
    
}

[download]

Any ideas? Maybe a solution that does the match, and substitution in one go?
Thanks in advance
Dan

In reply to Replacing numbers with links by danambroseUK

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