It's very useful to 'factor' regexes as one would factor subroutines. The relationships of the parts to each other and to the whole are clarified, and it becomes easier to change a part when necessary. This clarity and ease of maintenance can be important for complex regexes (or for simple regexes when you're trying to debug one at 3 AM!). 

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $prefix = qr{ (?i) \b tbgl_ }xms;
 my $word   = qr{ \w+ }xms;
 my $suffix = '_gl';
 ;;
 print '--- output ---';
 for my $pw (@ARGV) {
   (my $ws = $pw) =~ s{ $prefix ($word) }{$1$suffix}xmsg;
   print qq{'$pw' -> '$ws'};
   }
"
"tbgl_foo xxx %$# tbgl_bar()"
"TBGL_foo tBgL_bar"
"tbgl tbglfoo tbgl_"
"tbgl_%$# Xtbgl_foo"
--- output ---
'tbgl_foo xxx %$# tbgl_bar()' -> 'foo_gl xxx %$# bar_gl()'
'TBGL_foo tBgL_bar' -> 'foo_gl bar_gl'
'tbgl tbglfoo tbgl_' -> 'tbgl tbglfoo tbgl_'
'tbgl_%$# Xtbgl_foo' -> 'tbgl_%$# Xtbgl_foo'

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In the example above, it was only necessary to change the definition of  $prefix from
    my $prefix = qr{ \b tbgl_ }xms;
to
    my $prefix = qr{ (?i) \b tbgl_ }xms;
when somebody said "Oh, by the way, the prefix pattern is supposed to be case insensitive."

One could use the /i regex modifier (see Modifiers in perlre) instead of the  (?i) extended pattern (see Extended Patterns in perlre) to make  $prefix case insensitive, but the latter is less easy to overlook.

In reply to Re: regex replace problem by AnomalousMonk
in thread regex replace problem by Anonymous Monk

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