this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Chaining Substitutions (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I was recently reading through Perl Regular Expression Tutorial (perlretut) when I found the section on using the 'r' option. I'd seen this before but rarely had any reason to use it. Then it occurred to me that you could chain these together.

I've been programming Perl for 30+ years and don't think I've ever seen this before.

Here's an example that shows how I would usually do this, i.e. a series of var =~ s/// lines, and how to do the same thing in one line while initializing a variable.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';

my $T = "one two trash THREE random";
my $T2 = $T;
$T2 =~ s/trash|random//g;
$T2 =~ s/(THREE)/lc($1)/e;
$T2 =~ s/\s+/ /g;
$T2 =~ s/^/Count with me: /;

my $T3 = $T =~ s/trash|random//gr =~ s/(THREE)/lc($1)/er =~ s/\s+/ /gr =~ s/^/Count with me: /r;

say "T  := $T\nT2 := $T2\nT3 := $T3";

Output:

$ ./perl-subst-test.pl 
T  := one two trash THREE random
T2 := Count with me: one two three 
T3 := Count with me: one two three 

Anyways, I had to tell someone ...

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Non-destructive substitution was introduced in Perl 5.14 (released in 2011) so it's not surprising you haven't heard of it if you've been programming perl for years before that. Especially if you're not always reading every single release announcement.

Hanging out on the Perl Slack and Discord channels is fun because there's always someone out there who drops one of these kind of obscure but incredibly useful features when someone asks for help.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Where do I find this slack and discord? asking for a friend...

edit: I found "Perl Hideout" ... is that one?