Removing special characters

jeiku has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I have a file in the format:

"information","1234","3/23/2006 9:00:18AM","data","data","data","data"
"information","1234","3/23/2006 9:00:18AM","data","data","data","data"
"information","1234","3/23/2006 9:00:18AM","data","data","data","data"
[download]

I am trying to remove all the " characters with s/"//; but it isn't working... I've tried:

$file =~ s/"//;
[download]

and even:

for($i = 0; $i < scalar($#file + 1); $i++) {
$data[$i] =~ s/"//;
}
[download]

But I can't get it to work... please help! >_<

Comment on Removing special characters Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Removing special characters by borisz (Canon) on Mar 24, 2006 at 08:44 UTC
`perl -pe 'y/"//d' <file >output` [download] Boris	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Removing special characters by Plato (Friar) on Mar 24, 2006 at 09:17 UTC
Try this: `#!/usr/bin/perl foreach my $file (<DATA>){ $file =~ s/"//g; print "$file"; } __DATA__ "information","1234","3/23/2006 9:00:18AM","data","data","data","data" "information","1234","3/23/2006 9:00:18AM","data","data","data","data" "information","1234","3/23/2006 9:00:18AM","data","data","data","data"` [download] Plato,	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Removing special characters by tbone1 (Monsignor) on Mar 24, 2006 at 12:39 UTC
By way of explaining the solutions, the s/a/b/ command will substitute text on the first instance that the regular expression matches. If you want to replace every instance, you need the 'g' (global) modifier: s/a/b/g Also, the y command replaces every instance by default but doesn't use regular expressions. -- tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub) And remember, if he succeeds, so what. - Chick McGee	[reply]
Re^2: Removing special characters by jeiku (Acolyte) on Mar 27, 2006 at 05:11 UTC
Thank you everyone for your replies and explanations!	[reply]