Hi, I'm really new at Perl. I'm one day into the language to be exact. :) Already, I'm stuck. I'm trying to write a multipart program in Perl. The first part searches the user's input for a certain pattern (which the user specifies the pattern) and replace it with another pattern (which the user also specifies) and prints it out. I don't know Perl well enough to know what I'm doing wrong - which is probably everything. Here is what I have.
sub replace{ print "\nSearch Pattern: "; $pattern = <STDIN>; chomp($pattern); print "\nReplacement Pattern: "; $replacement = <STDIN>; chomp($replacement); while (<>){ if ($pattern){ substr($_, 0) = "$replacement"; } } }
Another thing I'm trying to do is make sure that if the pattern is capitalized in the search file (not the search pattern), my replacement pattern should also mirror it. I don't know if knowing this will change my programming or not. I hope that wasn't too confusing. Any help is much appreciated. (If you don't mind, please comment so I can learn.)

In reply to Searching and Replacing by Satira

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.