How to replace on a smooth way?

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How to replace on a smooth way? by Ratazong (Monsignor) on Apr 19, 2012 at 14:04 UTC
`$s =~ s/(§[\S])/\[$1\]/g;` [download] You search for a §, followed with anything but a blank and store it to $1. Then you replace it by itself surrounded by brackets. The modifier g means that you do it as often as possible. Update:* Thanks to i5513 and MidLifeXis for their improvements of my regex and for polishing my rusty knowledge! I like that in PerlMonks: by answering questions you often learn something for yourself, too :-)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: How to replace on a smooth way? by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Apr 19, 2012 at 14:37 UTC
In addition to i5513's response, you do not need to place `\S` within brackets — it is already a character class. --MidLifeXis	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: How to replace on a smooth way? by i5513 (Pilgrim) on Apr 19, 2012 at 14:25 UTC
Hello, Backslashes can be omited in the second operator of the substitution, there is not need to scape brackets there.	[reply]
Re^2: How to replace on a smooth way? by bestsiteeditor (Initiate) on Apr 19, 2012 at 14:18 UTC
Thank you so much, but here comes the tricky part: I have to match "§" and in the replacement to use "& # 0167;" otherwise - either does not match for "& # 0167;", or replacing with "§" in it - brings strange prints	[reply]
Re^3: How to replace on a smooth way? by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Apr 19, 2012 at 14:31 UTC
The stuff within the parens is a capture - if you move the § outside of the capturing parenthesis, and then add your required entity to the replacement text, it should do what you need. So, if you have a replacement `s/(A\S+)/[$1]/` and want to replace A with something else, you would use `s/A(\S+)/[B$1]/` instead, replacing `A` and `B` as necessary. A read of perlre, perlrequick, and perlretut may be helpful. I also wonder if HTML::Entities may be a more appropriate solution to the second requirement. --MidLifeXis	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: How to replace on a smooth way? by roboticus (Chancellor) on Apr 19, 2012 at 14:33 UTC
bestsiteeditor: That sounds like you may have an encoding problem, then. ...roboticus When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.	[reply]