Dearest Monks,

Please consider the following code:

use strict;

my $my_name = "august ferdinand mobius";

$my_name =~ s/\b(\w)/\U$1/g;

print $my_name;

#prints August Ferdinand Mobius
[download]

I am trying to create a subroutine that consumes a string, a pattern, a replacement and a modifier (perhaps limited to one or more of 'igsx') and returns the result of a substitution:

sub replace {
    my($text, $pattern, $replacement, $modifiers) = @_;
    (my $result = $text) =~ s/$pattern/$replacement/$modifiers;
    return $result;
}
[download]

I would like to call such a subroutine as follows:

$my_name = replace("august ferdinand mobius","\b(\w)","\U$1","igs");
[download]

Of course, the above doesn't work. But I have tried many other ways, e.g. using eval, s///ge, s///gee, etc.

I have attempted to do my homework using the Owl, Camel and Ram books, plus the perldoc, but I am totally stumped. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Update: 13:06 PST
This appears to work:

use strict;

my $x = "august ferdinand mobius";
my $y = replace($x, '\b(\w)', '\U$1', 'igs');
print $y;

sub replace {
    my($text, $pattern, $replacement, $modifiers) = @_;
    my $result = '';
    eval '($result = $text)'."=~ s/$pattern/$replacement/$modifiers";
    return $result;
}
[download]

It does however, to my mind, open security problems due to the eval'ing - which I hope is unnecessary with a more elegant solution. Besides security, will this fail on certain edge cases? (besides non-escaped members of the dirty dozen, which I'm handling now)

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