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

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Re: exact search and replace by Trimbach (Curate) on Mar 09, 2002 at 20:12 UTC
the \b modifier is your friend. It will match on word boundries, a zero-width assertion that will match the "Samn" in "Samn's" but not the "Charisma" is "Charismatic." i.e. `$def =~ s/\b$word\b/ <a href=$me\?word=$word>$entry[0]<\/a>/i;` [download] Gary Blackburn Trained Killer	[reply] [d/l]
Re: exact search and replace by Juerd (Abbot) on Mar 09, 2002 at 20:13 UTC
How can I make a more perfect search and replace, that replaces only words surrounded by white space or by a punctuation mark or marks? Use `\b`, that matches null strings at word boundaries. It's described in perlre, but has examples in perlretut: An anchor useful in basic regexps is the word anchor "\b". This matches a boundary between a word character and a non-word character "\w\W" or "\W\w": `$x = "Housecat catenates house and cat"; $x =~ /cat/; # matches cat in 'housecat' $x =~ /\bcat/; # matches cat in 'catenates' $x =~ /cat\b/; # matches cat in 'housecat' $x =~ /\bcat\b/; # matches 'cat' at end of string` [download] Note in the last example, the end of the string is considered a word boundary. 44696420796F7520732F2F2F65206F 7220756E7061636B3F202F6D736720 6D6521203A29202D2D204A75657264	[reply] [d/l]
Re: exact search and replace by Cody Pendant (Prior) on Mar 10, 2002 at 01:35 UTC
`>words surrounded by white space or by a punctuation mark or marks?` Just a note -- when is a punctuation mark not a punctuation mark? It's useful to note what exactly `\b` means. If you have hyphenated words, for instance, like say one of the people involved is called Sara-Jane, then will it work? -- `($_='jjjuuusssttt annootthhrer pppeeerrrlll haaaccckkeer')=~y/a-z//s;print;` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]