in reply to Recursive substitution difficulties

If it helps, the original data is coming in from a tab-delimited file, and I have control over getting that data from 

[tab]test|431|alpha|123|bravo|542|charlie|412[tab]

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to any intermediate step necessary.

Right now, the field above is being dumped into my input XML file as: 

<name>test</name><value>431|alpha|123|bravo|542|charlie|412</value>

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Re^2: Recursive substitution difficulties
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 15, 2010 at 20:59 UTC
    My earlier solution can easily be adapted: 
    s{\t([^\t]+)\t}{
   my $s = "|$1";
   $s =~ s{\|([^|]*)\|([^|]*)}{<name>$1</name><value>$2</value>}sg;
   $s
}eg;

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[d/l]

      Thanks. That looks pretty straightforward. Is it possible to use that all on a command line invocation? Right now I have something like: 

      perl -pe "s/^(.*?)\t(.*?)\|(.*?)\t(.*?)(?=\n)/<wrapper1>$1</wrapper1><
+wrapper2>$2\|$3</wrapper2><wrapper3>$4</wrapper3>/g;" inputfile

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      and then a follow-up to expand wrapper2 and the delimited fields within.

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[d/l]

        I was humouring your weird way of doing things, but it doesn't scale. Split the input into fields, edit the fields you want 

        perl -lape'
   $F[1] =~ s{\|([^|]*)\|([^|]*)}{<name>$1</name><value>$2</value>};
   $F[2] =~ s{\|([^|]*)\|([^|]*)}{<foo>$1</foo><bar>$2</bar>};
   $_ = join("\t", @F);
' inputfile

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[d/l]

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