Perl

matching and replacing workaround

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Join Date: May 2005

Posts: 45

Reputation: derekn is an unknown quantity at this point

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derekn

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matching and replacing workaround

Nov 8th, 2009

I want to search "The tree is in the yard" for the word "the", then replace the word "the" with "the", which I currently do with "s/$searchstring/$searchstring/gi;" BUT I want to preserve the case of the word, so that in this example the first word of the sentence would be white, but would have the capital T preserved. How can I do this?

Thanks,
Derek

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Join Date: Feb 2008

Posts: 33

Reputation: klactose is an unknown quantity at this point

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klactose

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Nov 9th, 2009

What you need to use is one of the back-reference variables, specifically you should use "$&" since you essentially want to reuse each occurrence of your search string

Give this a try

 Help with Code Tags 
 perl Syntax (Toggle Plain Text) 
$someText =~ s/$searchstring/<font color=#FFFFFF>$&<\/font>/gi;
$someText =~ s/$searchstring/<font color=#FFFFFF>$&<\/font>/gi;

•

Originally Posted by derekn

I want to search "The tree is in the yard" for the word "the", then replace the word "the" with "the", which I currently do with "s/$searchstring/$searchstring/gi;" BUT I want to preserve the case of the word, so that in this example the first word of the sentence would be white, but would have the capital T preserved. How can I do this?

Thanks,
Derek

•

Join Date: May 2005

Posts: 45

Reputation: derekn is an unknown quantity at this point

Solved Threads: 0

derekn

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Light Poster

Nov 10th, 2009

•

Originally Posted by klactose

What you need to use is one of the back-reference variables, specifically you should use "$&" since you essentially want to reuse each occurrence of your search string

Give this a try
Help with Code Tags

perl Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)
$someText =~ s/$searchstring/$&<\/font>/gi;
$someText =~ s/$searchstring/$&<\/font>/gi;