Re^2: Phone Number Regular Expression

Thanks, Roy, that's most helpful!

Of course, it's not quite as simple as all that - I want to substitute a different area code, and make sure to capture things that are formatted slightly differently. So I tested out this substitution, and I'm a little trouble with the scalars:

$_ = "800 555-9998";
s/800( |-|.)555-(?!9999)([0-9]{4})/888$1555-$2/;
print $_;
[download]

This doesn't seem to work, when I try to include $1 (the separator), though the second scalar comes through fine. I'm guessing I need something to set off $1 from '555'?

Apologies if I'm missing some basic syntax rules; I'm fairly new to perl's regexp lingo.

Comment on Re^2: Phone Number Regular Expression Download Code

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Re^3: Phone Number Regular Expression by japhy (Canon) on Mar 16, 2006 at 17:45 UTC
`s/.../888${1}555-$2/` will do it for you. The braces around the variable name, specifically, are what you're looking for. Jeff `japhy` Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and `perl` hacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Phone Number Regular Expression by lev36 (Sexton) on Mar 16, 2006 at 17:55 UTC
Righteous! That should give me all the building blocks I need for my script. Thanks again to all! And thanks also to whomever gave the thread a more useful name...	[reply]
Re^3: Phone Number Regular Expression by Crackers2 (Parson) on Mar 16, 2006 at 18:17 UTC
Unrelated to the immediate problem, but you probably want `( \|-\|\.)` instead of `( \|-\|.)` near the start of your match, since the dot has special meaning within a regex and will match any character (almost. see perlre). This means that currently that part of your regex is equivalent to just `(.)`, and will happily match something like 8003555-1234	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Phone Number Regular Expression by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Mar 16, 2006 at 17:47 UTC
You can set off variables from their surrounding text by enclosing the variable name in braces: `s/800( \|-\|.)555-(?!9999)([0-9]{4})/888${1}555-$2/;` [download] Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.	[reply] [d/l]