String Replacement

[dalhousi]

Hi Everyone,

How do I replace the "'" in a string with the escape character "\'" in Perl?

or in general: how do I replace a substring with another substring? In PHP: I would use the function str_replace. Is there any function in Perl similar to str_replace?

Thanks in advance
Cheers

 

[ishnid]

In general terms:

$variable =~ s/replace/replace with/g;

"replace" is a regular expression, "replace with" is a string. Remove the 'g' at the end to make it replace just once.

In your case:

$variable =~ s/'/\\'/g;

Note that the backslash needs to be escaped.

 

[xmassey]

I literally just did this for a chatbox script I had written to replace explicit words with another word. I simply used...

$message =~ s/damn/bunnies/;

I place this code directly after i had diclared that $message = param('message');

Before printing the message it will check if the word damn has been used and if it has then it will replace it with bunnies
hehe

 

[travs69]

xmassey

you code will only catch the first damn and stop... you need to put a g on the end of it to catch if they put more than one.

$message =~ s/damn/bunnies/g;

 

[dalhousi]

Thanks guys. That was very helpful.

Cheers,

 

[xmassey]

yeah your right, I just saw in my book that it also says put g at the end if you want to replace all strings...

Another useful thing is to put i as well, and this ignores the case of the letters

so..

$message =~ s/damn/bunnies/gi;

 

[ishnid]

That will also match the character sequence d-a-m-n even if it isn't a word by itself, so it would change "damned" into "bunniesed".