in reply to Problem with String replace in file

The | is the "or" operator in a regular expression. You need to escape it for your regex to work:

s/\|\|/|\\N|/g;

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meraxes

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Re^2: Problem with String replace in file
by philosophia (Sexton) on Oct 22, 2007 at 17:31 UTC
    if I use

    s/\|\|/|\\N|/g;

    it replaces || with ||. The \N seems to be an invisible newline character, and I want it to just be '\N'.
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      I suspect your problem is that you are writing back to the filehandle IN when you (presumably) only opened it for read.

      open( IN, '<', $filename ); # input
open( OUT, '>', 'newfilename.txt' ); # output
while ( <IN> ) {
    s/\|\|/|\\N|/g;
    print OUT;
}
close IN;
close OUT;

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      meraxes
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        This was correct, thank you. || is replaced by |\N| throughtout newfilename.txt.
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      \n will result in a newline.
      \N will result in a syntax error.
      \\N will give \N.

      If you're not getting \N from \\N, there's something you haven't showed us.

      Update: meraxes caught the problem.

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