Find/Chng every <any>

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

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Re: Find/Chng every <any> by stevieb (Canon) on Sep 03, 2010 at 19:46 UTC
I hope I understand correctly what you are trying to do... does this seem right? `# note the ? perl -ple 's/<.?>/<blah>/g' data.txt` [download] Where data.txt contains: `Hello. I'm <cold>. Very <cold>. I like to be <hot>. This is <today>. <today> I don't know what happened <yesterday>.` [download] ...and the result: `perl -ple 's/<.?>/<blah>/g' data.txt Hello. I'm <blah>. Very <blah>. I like to be <blah>. This is <blah>. <blah> I don't know what happened <blah>.` [download] Steve	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Find/Chng every <any> by Saved (Beadle) on Sep 03, 2010 at 19:54 UTC
Thanx, that is great.	[reply]
Re: Find/Chng every <any> by moritz (Cardinal) on Sep 03, 2010 at 19:40 UTC
if you have a string `<a>b<c>`, then the .* matches `a>b<c`, not just a. If you want avoid that, use `[^<>]` instead of `.`. See also: perlretut, perlre. Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Find/Chng every <any> by nvivek (Vicar) on Sep 04, 2010 at 03:56 UTC
It should be `[^<>]+` not `[^<>]` because means 0 or more occurrence of previous character in regular expression of Perl.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Find/Chng every <any> by Anonymous Monk on Sep 05, 2010 at 03:18 UTC
Unless, of course, "any text" can include an empty string.	[reply]
Re: Find/Chng every <any> by ambrus (Abbot) on Sep 05, 2010 at 07:41 UTC
stevieb has already given a solution, but no-one has so far explained why your original code doesn't work. Why I think it doesn't work is this: the `s///g` expression returns false if it hasn't found any matches in the line, so then because of the `&&` operator the print won't be ran. You could write this instead if you want all lines to be printed, even those where nothing is replaced: `perl -lne 's/<.*>/<new text>/g; print'` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]