Hey all, I have a txt document I'm trying to reformat so that it can be used in print. I read somewhere that I can UTF-8 by specifying it at the beginning of the document use utf8; and can refer to it in regular expression substitutions or translations as in this example: $s =~ s/-/\x{2014}/g;. This should turn a hyphen into an em dash correct? My larger problem is that I have a string on which I would like to do a global substitution. The problem is, I only want to do the substitutions on the hyphens which are surrounded by 3 digits on both sides. There's a lot of other hyphens in the string and I don't want to have to go through and make a whole bunch of substrings or split the string into an array at those particular hyphens. Is there a way to match a regex but to only substitute the hyphen in it? Here's and example of non-working code: 
my $str = "725-275 is an entry - and will be at 423-569 -but- not at 0
+12-457."; 
$str =~ s/\d{3}-\d{3}/\d{3}\x{2014}\d{3}/g;

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(Yes, I am aware that the result would be grammatically incorrect.) Unfortunately, this throws an error: "Unrecognized escape \d passed through"

In reply to match substitution by ShayShay

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