Re: Simple Substitution

There's several options for your regex.

You could add the character you're binding with to your replace
```
s/([^?])'/$1\'\n/g
[download]
```
You could use negative lookbehind
```
s/(?<!\?)'/\'\n/g
[download]
```

Also, instead of -ne, I'd use -pe and get rid of the print statement. I'd also look at making it -pi.bak -e to do in-place editing with a backup file.

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Comment on Re: Simple Substitution Select or Download Code

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Re^2: Simple Substitution by winter67uk (Initiate) on Jan 14, 2005 at 10:42 UTC
Dragonchild (and all who followed) - thank you. This line did the trick for me: `perl -pe "s/([^?])'/$1'/g" input.txt` Things you folks taught me: grouping in a regex - see perlrequick the special variable $1 - ditto the -p switch the -i switch check code before posting. I had two errors in mine (extra double quote and unnecessary escape) Cheers - Winter	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Simple Substitution by winter67uk (Initiate) on Jan 18, 2005 at 11:22 UTC
Final Update: this is what I used in the end... Parses a string in a file. The string uses an apostrophe as line terminator. Ignores apostrophes predeeded by the escape character, "?". Clever enough not to parse the same file more than once. `perl -p -i.bak -e "s/([^?])'([^\n])/$1'\n$2/g" input.txt` perl: Invokes the command interpreter. -p: p switch is 'assume loop like -n but print line also'. -i.bak: i switch is edit in place, .bak is the extension of the backup file. -e: e switch is 'one line of program'. "...": Use double quotes for Windows OS. s/.../.../g: Substitute. Match 1st and substitute 2nd. g means global. (...)...(...): Groups - whatever the value between brackets winds up in $1, $2 etc. `([^?])'([^\n])`: Match any apostrophes neither preceeded by the escape character "?" nor followed by a new line "\n" - three characters total. $1'\n$2: Replace matches with the value of group one (see above) followed by an apostrophe and a new line(\n) and the value of group two - four characters total. input.txt: File to parse.	[reply] [d/l] [select]