this is a very confusing question. do you want to turn "my name is George Bush and I live in America" into "my name is <name> and I live in <country>" or the other way around?

assuming the former, one way would be to first build up a regular expression for each 'type' you want to discover, then loop through them and perform substitutions on your sentence. consider something along these lines.. 

use strict;
use warnings;

## some sample 'types' and potential values
my %types = (
    name => [
        'George Bush',
        'Osama Bin Laden',
    ],
    country => [
        'America',
        'Your Pants',
    ],
);

## turn those arrays into foo|bar|baz (quotemeta to deal with potentia
+l U.S.A.)
my %regexes = map { $_ => join( '|', map quotemeta, @{ $types{$_} }) }
+ keys %types;

## some sample sentences
my @sentences = (
    'my name is George Bush and I live in America',
    'my name is Osama Bin Laden and I want to visit Your Pants',
);

## discover 'types' in each sentence
foreach my $sentence ( @sentences ) {
    print "before: $sentence\n";
    while ( my ($type, $pattern) = each %regexes ) {
        $sentence =~ s/$pattern/<$type>/g;
    }
    print " after: $sentence\n\n";
}

[download]
produces: 
before: my name is George Bush and I live in America
 after: my name is <name> and I live in <country>

before: my name is Osama Bin Laden and I want to visit Your Pants
 after: my name is <name> and I want to visit <country>

[download]
if you are trying to go the other way, then consider one of the many templating packages available..

(update: and yeah, if you don't have a pre-defined list of names and countries you are searching for, this is a much different problem, as ayrnieu references above.)

In reply to Re: Replacing Types by mreece
in thread Replacing Types by Anonymous Monk

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