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

monks

from a file I am looking for a pattern 

<!DOCTYPE report SYSTEM "http://belief:8081/metrica_reporting/report_0
+1.dtd">

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and I want to replace the above line as 
<!DOCTYPE report SYSTEM "../../../../../Reporting/bin/report.dtd">

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For doing the above task I used the below code 
perl -nle 's/(.*) SYSTEM (.*)/$1 SYSTEM quotemeta("..\/../../../../Rep
+orting/bin/report.dtd">)/g; print' 1-report.xml

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won't I be able to use quotemeta inside the replace pattern ?

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Re: using quotemeta in search and replace
by rhesa (Vicar) on Nov 16, 2006 at 02:37 UTC
    Why not use different delimiters on the whole replacement expression? I usually use curly braces when there are slashes in either side, e.g. s{some/path}{other/path}. See perlop under Quote-and-Quote-like-Operators for more details.

    Also note that perl comes with a -p switch, which does the -n and print for you. 

    perl -ple 's{(.*) SYSTEM (.*)}{$1 SYSTEM "../../../../../Reporting/bin
+/report.dtd">}g' 1-report.xml

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