Regular expression help

[Zippeh]

Hey!

I want to write a small regular expression to replace "&" with "&" in URLs. Some of the URLs already contain the "&" so I want to skip these ones.

So I need a regular expression that will ignore any "&" followed by "amp;". Any idea how I'd get about this?

 

[ishnid]

You need a negative lookahead. Have a look here in perlretut.

 

[Zippeh]

Got it!

&(?!amp

cheers!

 

[PaulTEG]

Is it likely that the ampersand to denote and, will always be followed by a space?

$str =~ s/& /&/g

Paul
------------------------------------
Spend an hour a week on CPAN, helps cure all known programming ailments ;-)

 

[Zippeh]

Not when the & is contained within the querystring part of an URL

 

[PaulTEG]

fair enough ...:~/
mental note to self, read whole post ;-)

 

[stevexff]

Do you need the other XML escapes ", ', <, > as well? In which case, make sure you do the & substitution first - you get really strange results otherwise

Steve

[small]"Every program can be reduced by one instruction, and every program has at least one bug. Therefore, any program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work." (Object:erlDesignPatterns)[/small]

 

[Zippeh]

Yeah I got a big function that changes them all, first thing it does it do & -> &

 

[PaulTEG]

If it's that good post it ;-)

Paul
------------------------------------
Spend an hour a week on CPAN, helps cure all known programming ailments ;-)

 

[Zippeh]

Haha I would, but it's in VBScript (flame away!)

Just posted in here cos it's where I thought the regexp experts would be residing

 

[stevexff]

Mum, Dad, there's something you need to know about me. I'm not like the other kids my age. I'm a VBScript programmer...

Steve

[small]"Every program can be reduced by one instruction, and every program has at least one bug. Therefore, any program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work." (Object:erlDesignPatterns)[/small]