in reply to s/// treat rhs as regex

If you're sure that your shell doesn't expand metacharacters (that is, print $regexReplace to make sure it's sane), add the /e flag to your regexp.

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Re^2: s/// treat rhs as regex
by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Sep 07, 2008 at 10:14 UTC
    Isn't a double-level of interpolation and eval required? 
    perl -wMstrict -e
"my $regexSearch  = $ARGV[0];
 my $regexReplace = $ARGV[1];
 my @strings = qw(103_foo 124_bar 109_quux);
 for my $string (@strings) {
   my $oldstring = $string;
   $string =~ s{ $regexSearch }{ qq{qq{$regexReplace}} }xmsee;
   print \"renamed $oldstring to $string \n\";
   }
"
1(\d\d.*)   4$1
renamed 103_foo to 403_foo
renamed 124_bar to 424_bar
renamed 109_quux to 409_quux

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    Update: See also printig with variables in text and simple regular expression for further discussion.

[reply]
[d/l]
      Thank you very much. This is very helpful. I had examined the /e flag but didn't really grasp it. This plus your additions have been very elucidating.
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