Ahoy, ye salty Monks.

I just had a situation where I wanted to perform a transformation on every instance of a pattern in a string, but that transformation is dynamic, and I don't know how to do that.

For example, say I want to replace every instance of a number with a different form of the same number. Specifically, I want to replace 20000 with 20 K, 20000000 with 20 M, and 12345678 with 12 M.

The first thing I tried was:

sub munge {
   my $num = shift;
   if ( $number > 1000000 ) {
      return ($number / 1000000).' M';
   }
   if ( $number > 1000 ) {
      return ($number / 1000).' K';
   }
}

my $text = <<END;
Hello 200000 how 12345678 are
you?  I have 35000 dogs.  I 
consume 32000000 hamburgers a day.
END

$text =~ s/(\d+)/munge($1)/g;

[download]

...but that didn't work.

Thanks!
--Pileofrogs

In reply to substitute with sub result? by pileofrogs

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