I notice you have this:

while( <$infh> ) {
        s{&}{&amp;}g; ## In some case does not match as intended
        s{&amp;amp;}{&amp;}g;
        ...
}
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presumably because, when the input line already contains &, the first substitution changes it to &, so the second substitution is needed to change it back again! Better to replace these two substitutions with a single substitution using a negative look-ahead assertion (?!...). Proof-of-concept:

14:25 >perl -wE "my @s = ('Fred & Wilma', 'Barney & Betty'); for (
+@s) { s{&(?!amp;)}{&}g }; say for @s;"
Fred & Wilma
Barney & Betty

14:25 >
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See “Look-Around Assertions” in perlre#Extended-Patterns.

Hope that helps,

Dear Athanasius

Thanks a mil for posting your regular expression.

It is quite funny, since that line that caught your interest was no longer part of the code, I must have posted this particular version by accident.

However, this will surely resolve some issues to come.

Your help is much appreciated

Thanks a mil again, I will bookmark the extended regex patterns, I am sure I might be needing them soonish

Kind regards

C.

Dear Monks

As promised last time, I ran the code using new files that needed to be checked at work

Given the previous comments, examples and the lovely testing script one of you provided, I found out that some of the directories had not been touched due to unicode characters (mostly umlauts) and whitespace in the actual file name.

I went through previous posts in the forum and the web checking for answers. One suggestion was using the Encode module for the file names I am reading from the text file.

I took a look at the module, but I am a bit at a loss how to implement the module in the subroutines and modules which are already in use. I assume that the GetPaths subs needs some editing, provided I am on the right track.

Would be grand if you guys could give me a hint on a) whether Encode is the right module for reading umlaut-and-whitespace-packed file names. b) if not => any other solution to the issue

Thanks a mil in advance

Kind regards

C

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use 5.014;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Path::Tiny qw/ path /;
use POSIX();
use autodie qw/ close /;
use File::BOM;
use Carp::Always; 
use Data::Dump qw/ dd /;
use Encode qw(encode decode);


Main( @ARGV );
exit( 0 );

sub Main {

    #my( $infile_paths ) = @_; #if run via
    my( $infile_paths ) = 'C:\dev\test_paths.txt';
    chomp $infile_paths;
    my @paths = GetPaths( $infile_paths );
    for my $path ( @paths ){
        RetrieveAndBackupXML( $path );
    }
    return @paths;
} 

## end sub Main

sub GetPaths  {
      use File::BOM;
##    my @paths = path( shift )->lines_utf8;
    my @paths = path( shift )->lines( { binmode => ":via(File::BOM)" }
+ );
    s/\s+$// for @paths; # "chomp"
    return @paths;
} 

## end sub GetPaths 

sub RetrieveAndBackupXML {
    my( $directory ) = shift; ## same as shift @_ ##  
    my $date      = POSIX::strftime( '%Y-%m-%d', localtime );  #suffix
+ for the backup-file, e.g. 2014-08-01
    my $bak       = "$date.bak"; 
    my @xml_files = path( $directory )->children( qr/\.xml$/ );
    for my $file ( @xml_files ) {
        Replace( $file, "$file-$bak" ); 
    }
} 

## end sub Main

# Fix xml entities and create a copy of the original file before editi
+ng
sub Replace {
    my( $in, $bak ) = @_;
    
    path( $in )-> copy( $bak ); #create a copy of $in with the ending(
+s) specified in $bak
    
    my $infh  = path( $bak )->openr_raw;
    my $outfh = path( $in )->openrw_raw;
    
    while( <$infh> ) {
        s{&}{&amp;}g; ## In some case does not match as intended
        s{\s>\s}{&gt;}g;
        s{\s<\s}{&lt;}g;
        print $outfh $_;
    }
  
    close $infh;
    close $outfh;
}

 ## end sub Replace
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