Hello, monks! I am starting my third week of Perl experience. Coming from a (limited) C++ background, I am fascinated with the ease and potency of regular expressions. But now I have run into something I don't think regexes can solve.

The problem: I have a number of strings composed of a hodgepodge of information - dates, times, comments, other numbers, etc. I am trying to replace some of the dates with their epoch timestamps.

Thus far:

Where I'm stuck: I'm not sure how to get the timestamp back into the appropriate string in the proper place(s). I have tried using a subroutine with search and replace, i.e. s/<regex to find date>/&<subroutine to calculate date's timestamp>/ge, but I continue to get syntax errors (I assume because you can't call subroutines inside a regex).

Thoughts on how to proceed:

  1. This would be easily solved if I could find essentially a "search, modify, replace" function or something similar. I'm only assuming one cannot call subroutines inside s/ / / because I am getting errors trying to do so - if it is indeed possible, please correct me - and maybe provide a dummy example too please. ^_^
  2. I guess I could also completely rebuild the strings, i.e. breakup every field (into an array), modify the ones I need to, and then reassemble the string. It just seems tedious and messy. I wanted to check with some more experienced folks to make sure I wasn't doing a lot of silly and unnecessary work.

Thanks!

In reply to Search, modify, replace? by Timjc86

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