in reply to Re: shrinking the path
in thread shrinking the path

Thanks bart !

it worked , even before posting i tried what boris had suggested but that lead to a failure why ?

prad

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: shrinking the path
by bart (Canon) on Feb 01, 2005 at 13:03 UTC
    The difference is in my use of quotemeta, \Q inside the regex. His version uses your string as a regex, mine turns it into a literal search.

    Here is a simple demo for what's going on: 

    my $string = 'c:\\Windows';
my $search = '\\W';
my $qm = quotemeta($search);
my $raw = $string; $raw=~ s/$search/#/;
my $cooked = $string; $cooked =~ s/\Q$search/#/;
print <<"TEST"
original string: '$string'
search string: '$search'
search string after quotemeta: '$qm'
substitution without \\Q: '$raw'
substitution with \\Q: '$cooked'
TEST

    [download]
    Result: 
    original string: 'c:\Windows'
search string: '\W'
search string after quotemeta: '\\W'
substitution without \Q: 'c#\Windows'
substitution with \Q: 'c:#indows'
    As you can see, with quotemeta, it replaced the substring backslash+"W", because that's what /\\W/ searches for. Without it, it just searched for the first non-word character and replaced it — that happens to be a ":".
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom