What these solutions seem to be missing is the OP wants to achieve a transformation, rather than capturing the individual 'x' groupings. More specifically, part of the string will be preserved in a known manner, while the rest is transformed.

In addition, I assume the 'x' characters are stand-ins for real alphanumeric data. So, now I think we can generalize the regex a lot via these rules:

- Skip a pipe at the beginning of the line.
- Grab a) alphanumerics and dashes up to third occurance of dash, b) the rest.
- In "the rest", replace pipes and dashes with commas.
- OP says "remove spaces", but his example shows the space being replaced by a comma, so do that. 

$s='|xx-xxx-xxxxx-xxx x/xx|xx-xxxx-xxx-xx-xxxx-xx-xx|';

# in one line, if not one command
($a, $b)=$s=~/^\|?(\w+-\w+-\w+-)(.+)/; $b=~s/[-| ]/,/g; $s=$a . $b; 

print $s
# xx-xxx-xxxxx-xxx,x/xx,xx,xxxx,xxx,xx,xxxx,xx,xx,

[download]

In reply to Re^2: REGEX detailed character replace by furry_marmot
in thread REGEX detailed character replace by pjc955

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.