Re^2: Regexes and backslashes

Oh, dear. I guess I'm extra awful at explaining what I mean tonight. Pity; I suppose the only thing left is to shoot myself and get it over with. :)

Your example does indeed result in the above output - but that's not what I'm looking for. I would like for the escaped semicolons to be converted to non-escaped semicolons; for escaped commas to be converted to non-escaped commas; and for escaped newlines to be converted to actual newlines. Metacharacters, not literal '\n's. Ones that actually result in newlines being produced on the screen when a line is printed - i.e.,

Line 1:	Goodbye; Good luck, and thanks for all the fish!
Line 2:

and NOT

Line 1:

Goodbye; Good luck, and thanks for all the fish!\n\n

(I'm not trying to come across as being snarky; I'm just trying to make *sure* that I'm getting across what I mean, since I've obviously failed to do so before now.)

-- 
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
 -- W. B. Yeats

Comment on Re^2: Regexes and backslashes

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: Regexes and backslashes by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Feb 16, 2011 at 06:14 UTC
OK, how about this one. It's a little bit klunky in its use of a conversion hash, but the hash can easily be expanded as needed. `>perl -wMstrict -le "$_ = 'Goodbye\; Good luck\, and thanks for all the fish!\n\n'; my %conv = ( ',' => ',', ';' => ';', n => qq{\n} ); print qq{[[$_]]}; s{ \\([,;n]) }{$conv{$1}}xmsg; print qq{[[$_]]};; " [[Goodbye\; Good luck\, and thanks for all the fish!\n\n]] [[Goodbye; Good luck, and thanks for all the fish! ]]` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Regexes and backslashes by oko1 (Deacon) on Feb 16, 2011 at 08:24 UTC
Heh. Yeah, we could even in-line it: `s\|\\([,;n])\|${{',',',',';',';',n=>"\n"}}{$1}\|g;` [download] Nicely confusing. :) I guess there really is no way to make this work with a simple char class replacement, though. Oh well. -- Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. -- W. B. Yeats	[reply] [d/l]
Re^5: Regexes and backslashes by wind (Priest) on Feb 16, 2011 at 08:44 UTC
Cute :) Slightly more condensed: `s/\\([,;n])/${{n=>"\n"}}{$1}\|\|$1/eg;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Regexes and backslashes by wind (Priest) on Feb 16, 2011 at 08:34 UTC
Aye, this does make it more clear, although I already understood what you meant in the end. The problem of course was your extra backslashes in the original string confused your intent. `$_ = 'Goodbye\; Good luck\, and thanks for all the fish!\\n\\n';` [download] Being synonymous with and more simply stated as `$_ = 'Goodbye\; Good luck\, and thanks for all the fish!\n\n';` [download] I certainly understand your beef with evaling, but given you know the content of the eval to a certainty, I don't believe there is any security risk. Would be interested if proven wrong there though.	[reply] [d/l] [select]