ER makes me er..... 1

[webamoeba]

Hi,

I've always had difficulties understanding REs, and today is no exception! I want to be able to replace any occurances of:

<person>XXX</person>

with:

'<a href="somePage.pl?id=XXX">'$this->get('XXX')->toString'</a>'

where XXX can be any length and is numeric. How do I do this???

Thanks.

 

[Kirsle]

perlretut:

http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?perlretut

s~<person>(\w+)</person>~<a href="somePage.pl?id=$1">$this->get($1)->toString</a>~g;

I'm not sure if the inclusion of $this->get($1)->toString will work in that example or not. Sometimes Perl code runs in a regexp like that, sometimes not. If not, just use a while loop, which gives you a little more freedom (and looks cleaner than the thing on perlretut with actually executing Perl within the regexp)

while ($variable =~ m~<person>(\w+)</person>~) {
   my $id = $1;
   my $string = $this->get($1)->toString;

   $variable =~ s~<person>$id</person>~<a href="somePage.pl?id=$1">$string</a>~;
}

 

[doood]

#!/usr/bin/perl

undef $/;
$_ = <DATA>;
$/ = "\n";

s|<person>(\d+)</person>|<a href="somePage.pl?id=$1">'$this->get('$1')->toString'</a>|g;

print;

[blue]__DATA__
blah blah <person>43</person> blah blah <person>123</person> blah blah <person>998877</person> blah blah <person>3</person> blah blah <person>987123456</person> blah blah[/blue][/code]

 

[webamoeba]

Thanks Kirsle!!!

Works like a charm! yay!