I tried what I could of your code. First, it's not clear to me what you intended with your double quotation mark in the s/// function. Was it your intent to replace quotation marks by "-eee-"?

When I ran it both ways (printed to STDOUT and to a file), the results were the same - the substitution was performed, and I got "-eee-" both on the screen and in the file

My guess is that you've somehow eliminated the bug while trying to show us the problem. See if you can come up with a short script that cuts out all the unnecessary stuff, but that still produces the bug.

I've found that most of the time, when I try to reduce the code to the bare minimum that still has the bug, I wind up figuring out what the problem is myself - the bug suddenly shows up very clearly, once all the other stuff has been removed.

Finally, when you're showing code, use the <code> tags. They automatically format the code into legible form.