in reply to replace string

Quite frankly, you appear to have some malformed HTML code that you want to clean up and make more human readable.

Moving away from say <ttl>blah..blah</ttl> to a less standard format of {ttl}blah..blah, is in my opinion a mistake.

There are lots of modules that can deal with: <ttl>blah..blah</ttl>. So I opted below to do what I could to "clean things up". I don't think that what you are asking for is a good idea. Of course there could be things that I don't know. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while( <DATA> ) 
{
   s/<\s*/</g;     #compress spaces right after "< xxx"
   s/\s*>/>/g;     #compress spaces right before "xxx >"
   s/(.)</$1\n</g; #add \n before < if not already on new line
   print $_;
}

# prints:
# [SOUR]
# Por Gisela Orozco 312.527.8461/ Chicago\
# <line> Por Gisela Orozco
# <ttl>312.527.8461/ Chicago
# </ttl>

__DATA__
[SOUR]
Por Gisela Orozco 312.527.8461/ Chicago\
<line> Por Gisela Orozco< ttl>312.527.8461/ Chicago</ttl  >

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: replace string
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 20, 2009 at 04:25 UTC 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $tag;
my $output;
my $fh;
my $deletestrings;

while (<DATA>) {
s/\s*<\s*(\/?)\s*(\w+)\s*>\s*/$1?"\n":"\n\{$2\}\n"/ge;
    chomp;
 s/[\cA-\cZ]//g;     # To remove control characters
        s/^[\\|<]$//g; # To delete the character like \ and < at the e
+nd of the line
        s/[\\|<]$//; # To delete the character like \ and < at the beg
+ining of the line
        s/^\s+//g;  # To remove multiple spaces at the begining of the
+ line
        s/\s+$//g; # To remove  spaces at the end  of the line
    if(/^{(.*)}$/) {    # match {METATAG} line
        $fh = output($output, $tag, $fh);
        $output = "";
        $tag = $1;
    } else {            # not a {TAG} line
        next unless($tag);
        next if(/^\s*$/);
        s/\\//g;
        $output .= ($output) ? " $_" : "<$tag>$_";
    }
}

$fh = output($output, $tag, $fh);
if($fh) {
    print $fh "</ROOT>\n";
    close($fh);
}
exit(0);

# Subroutine to open the file with the filename as {SOURCETAG}
# Subroutine to open the file with the filename as {SOURCETAG}
sub output {
    my ($output, $tag, $fh) = @_;
    if($output) {
        if($output =~ m/<SOURCE>(.*)/) {
            if($fh) {
                print $fh "</ROOT>\n";
                close($fh);
            }
            open($fh, '>', "$1.xml") or die "$1.xml: $!";
            print $fh "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<RO
+OT>\n";
        }
        print $fh "$output</$tag>\n";
    }
    return($fh);
}
__DATA__
{SOURCE}
0904230634
{DATE}
090424
{EDITION}
1
{HEADLINE}
heredero del famoso deportista mexicano, lucha por enaltecer la vida y
+ obra
del autor de sus dM-mas
{SOURCE1}
Por Gisela Orozco 312.527.8461/ Chicago\
<byline> Por Gisela Orozco< ttl>312.527.8461/ Chicago</ttl>

    [download]
    When executed, it creates a file called 0904230634.xml in the current directory. The output is 
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ROOT>
<SOURCE>0904230634</SOURCE>
<DATE>090424</DATE>
<EDITION>1</EDITION>
<HEADLINE>heredero del famoso deportista mexicano, lucha por enaltecer
+ la vida y obra del autor de sus dM-mas</HEADLINE>
<SOURCE1>Por Gisela Orozco 312.527.8461/ Chicago {byline}Por Gisela Or
+ozco{ttl}312.527.8461/ Chicago</SOURCE1>
</ROOT>

    [download]
    So Instead of 
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ROOT>
<SOURCE>0904230634</SOURCE>
<DATE>090424</DATE>
<EDITION>1</EDITION>
<HEADLINE>heredero del famoso deportista mexicano, lucha por enaltecer
+ la vida y obra del autor de sus dM-mas</HEADLINE>
<SOURCE1>Por Gisela Orozco 312.527.8461/ Chicago</SOURCE1>
<byline>Por Gisela Orozco</byline>
<ttl>312.527.8461/ Chicago</ttl>
</ROOT>

    [download]
    So please tell me why the string is replaced only with {} and further it is not converted to < as for other tags
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Please tell the name of this format. What is the name of this format?
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom