Dear PerlMonks! I have a text file containing names, like

George Fortran
Jessi Heavens
Bill Clinton
Barack Obama
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
Bill Green
George Bush

These names are just for the sake of example. I would like to mark the firstnames occur more than one with a concatenated incremented number, so this list of names would be:

George1 Fortran
Jessi Heavens
Bill1 Clinton
Barack Obama
Bill2 Gates
Steve Jobs
Bill3 Green
George2 Bush

I can do this with hashes and arrays, but I want to do it with regex substitution.

My code:

$dat = join(" ", @a); $i = 1;
$dat =~ s/([a-zA-Z\+) (.*) \1/${1}$i ${2} ${1}$i/g;
print $dat;


This is what I could do, it does not find all occurences and doesn't increment $i. These two things are my problems. @a is an array containing all the firstnames, and only them. $dat is a string where firstnames are separated by space.

I don't know if there's a solution manipulating an array with substitution. It would be so good if I could do this for an array containing whole records ( 'Jessi Heavens' would be an element instead of only the firstname 'Jessi') and there still was a way to do the thing with regex.

Thanks in advance
stringZ

In reply to Indexing multiplicate firstnames with regex by stringZ

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