in reply to Replace only selected characters

Yet another way using a global look-ahead match and pos to find the commas then substr to erase all but the first, working back from the end of the string.

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ perl -E '
> $l = q{abc,def,ghi,jkl,mno};
> say $l;
> push @p, pos $l while $l =~ m{(?=,)}g;
> substr $l, $_, 1, q{} for reverse @p[ 1 .. $#p ];
> say $l;'
abc,def,ghi,jkl,mno
abc,defghijklmno
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$

[download]

Cheers,

JohnGG

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Re^2: Replace only selected characters
by hbm (Hermit) on Oct 17, 2011 at 13:37 UTC

    Interesting. I wondered why the look-ahead (and not just /,/g), but now I see.

    Note that you can do this: 

       push @p, pos $l while $l =~ m{(?=,)}g;

    [download]

    As: 

       push @p, @- while $l =~ /,/g;

    [download]
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[d/l]
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      Thanks everyone..Some very good methods
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