search and replace question

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

I am cleaning up a bunch of data and am putting together a series of perl commands to do the job.

The data to work on looks something like this:

fjfjf fjfjf fjfjf <?Pub fontsize="10.00pt"?> ghg gghg
fgf gf
gjgjg gjgjg gjgjg <?Pub fontsize="9.00pt"?> gggg
dfd dfdf dfd <?Pub fontsize=
"19.00pt"?> fgf fgfg gfff
fgf
fggf ghg ghgghhg ghghg
[download]

I need to simply remove the '<?Pub XXXX ?>' strings.

I am using a command like this:

find ./MMData -iname '*.dita*' -print|xargs perl -pi -e 's/<\?Pub fontsize\="0.50pt"\?\>/<\!\-\-Rem Pub Dir\-\-\>/g';

I've tried wildcard'ing the search string but cannot get it to work - I always seem to end up greedily taking up a lot of the rest of the file

Also - I cannot get my search to find these "search strings" that are split over a line - I guess if I can get the wildcard working I could put a linefeed in there ?

Also - now that I'm asking (!!!), how do I make this command NOT produce a BAK file ?

Comment on search and replace question Select or Download Code

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Re: search and replace question by almut (Canon) on Mar 11, 2010 at 08:31 UTC
For one, I think you'd want `'s/<\?Pub fontsize="[^"]"\?>/<!--Rem Pub Dir-->/g' ^^^^^` [download] i.e. match anything but a double quote between the double quotes that hold the fontsize. (As the fontsize value is unlikely to contain an escaped double quote itself, this simplified approach should work reasonably well.) The other issue with the wrapped lines not matching is simply because you're processing the file line by line* (option `-p`), so you never have more than one line in `$_` to match against (so `/s` won't help). Solving this in a "`-p`"-one-liner is rather involved... so you might want to check first whether you could maybe read the entire file into a single string instead.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: search and replace question by Hue-Bond (Priest) on Mar 11, 2010 at 08:21 UTC
I've tried wildcard'ing the search string but cannot get it to work - I always seem to end up greedily taking up a lot of the rest of the file Wildcards are greedy by default, which means that they'll take as much as they can, as you have already seen. Try appending a question mark to the quantifier, to make it non-greedy, ie use `abc.?` instead of `abc.`. Also - I cannot get my search to find these "search strings" that are split over a line - I guess if I can get the wildcard working I could put a linefeed in there ? Use the `/s` modifier in the regex. -- David Serrano (Please treat my english text just like Perl code, i.e. feel free to notify me of any syntax, grammar, style and/or spelling error. Thank you!).	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: search and replace question by jwkrahn (Abbot) on Mar 11, 2010 at 10:57 UTC
You probably want something like: `perl -i -0777pe's/<\?Pub\s+fontsize\s=\s"\d+\.\d+pt"\?>/<!--Rem Pub +Dir-->/g'` [download]	[reply] [d/l]