Perl help needed

[dsfunk]

I need to translate ^12 to twelve blank spaces. The carat and the following two digits translated into the number of spaces that the two digits says.

Chris^8Webber

translates to

ChrisWebber

for every line, multiple times per line

 

[notfred]

$string = "^12text^5"; # Or whatever string you want.... Chris^8Webber, for example.

$string =~ s/\^(\d+)/sprintf("%$1s")/ge;

 

[notfred]

I wonder why I answer questions when no one plans on reading my answers.

 

[oog]

i read it and it made sense to me

 

[dsfunk]

sweet, thanks notfred

one problem I have with that

There might be a numeric field after the ^## so I can't use the d+ I think. What do I use?

 

[dsfunk]

Originally posted by: notfred
I wonder why I answer questions when no one plans on reading my answers.

I didn't get back to it until this morning.

 

[Nothinman]

You can use \d{X} to tell it to only operate on X number of occurences.

 

[dsfunk]

ok thanks.

almost there.

I need to trim the leading zero off of that, if there is one, before it goes into %$1s

 

[notfred]

Did you change the line so that it looks for two digits instead of any arbitrary number of digits, and now you're padding single digit numbers with a zero? (That's what it sounds like)

If so:

$string =~ s/\^(\d{2})/sprintf("%".int($1)."s")/ge;

Of course, you can use \d{1,2} instead of \d{2} if you want to match either 1 or 2 digits, instead of only exactly two.

 

[dsfunk]

yep, thanks again

 

[dsfunk]

Another related question...If I also needed to print this to a webpage, what's wrong with this?


$line =~ s/\^(\d{2})/for ( my $counter=0; $counter<($1); $counter++){print "nbsp;";}/ge;

note nbsp does have an ampersand in front

 

[dsfunk]

I get the correct number of nbsp, but they are all at the beginning of the line, not replacing the ^##

 

[dsfunk]

bump this morning in case anyone knows

nevermind