I'm currently doing work on a Perl SDK for an HTTP API, and have hit a bit of a stumbling block with s///.

The API takes XML for input, and when adding or updating fields it will accept either the numeric field identifier or a formatted version of the field label/field name. For the formatting, the field name would be "Field Name" and the reformatted version would be "field_name".

Because it's an API I'd like to do that reformatting transparently, so the end user just has to type in the field name they want to use. I'm using the s/// regexp to do the formatting, but I'm in a situation where I'd like to use it inline but it only returns the number of substitutions performed. Is there any way to use the s/// inline and return the substitution's results?

Here's the code I'm using:

sub add_record($){
    my ($self, $data) = @_;
    my $record=[];
    foreach my $key (keys %{$data}){
        push(@{$record}, {
            tag=>"field", 
            atts=>{
                ($key=~m{^\d+$} ? "fid" : "name") => ($key=~m{^\d+$} ?
+ $key : lc($key =~ s/[^a-z0-9]/_/ig))
            },
            value=>$data->{$key}
        });
    }
    return post_api("API_AddRecord", $record);
}

[download]

And here's how it would be used:

add_record({"Field Name"=>"Field Value"})

In reply to Using s/// Inline by Jason Hutchinson

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