better code

[jimberger]

Hello,

Can anyone think of a better way of addressing the following problem. I have a form and any name can be submitted - including ones with accents and special characters - the names are then used later on in the script to generate a latex template using a system call. However, latex handles special characters differently, for example ü is wriiten as \'"{u}. Therefore, as a enter the function i want to substutite any accent characters with the equilavant code. This is what i have come up with but i'm sure there is a better way of doing this:

my @special_characters = ("ü","Ü","ç","Ç","ä","Ä","é","É"
my %character_map = ( "ü", "\\\"{u}",
"Ü", "\\\"{U}",
"ç", "\\c{c}",
"Ç", "\\c{C}",
"ä", "\\\"{a}",
"Ä", "\\\"{A}",
"é", "\\'{e}",
"É", "\\'{E}" foreach my $el (@special_characters){ if ($author =~ /($el)/){
my $letter = $character_map{$el};
$author =~ s/$1/$letter/g;
}
}

has anyone any suggestions?

jim

 

[latch]

The 'foreach' loop could be modifed thus


foreach my $el (@special_characters){
$author =~ s/$el/$character{$el}/g;
}

HTH
C "Brahmaiva satyam"
-Adi Shankara (788-820 AD)

 

[toolkit]

Things to make the code cleaner:

my %character_map = (
    "Ü" => qq{\\"{U}},
    "ç" => qq{\\c{c}},
    etc...
);
foreach( sort keys %character_map ) {
   $author =~ s/$_/$character_map{$_}/g;
}

You don't need a separate array of @special_characters.
Cheers, Neil

 

[toolkit]

ps: you can use q{\"{U}} instead of qq{\\"{U}} as well.