Thanks Jared and Frank for your quick responses. The solution, it turns out, had nothing to do with RE's, but rather with input lines and files. I'm dealing with multi-line, comma-separated-value records, using Perl programs to convert them to single line records, change bare carriage-return characters to newline characters and eventually remove extraneous trailing commas, e.g. ...,"Moe, Larry, Curly, ",... (the comma and space after "Curly" is extraneous). I guess you can only do so much in one pass through an input file. The solution was to write two Perl programs, and use a two-stage process as in: cat multi-line-input-records | makethemsinglelines.pl | removetrailingcommas.pl > greatlookingfile.out Thanks again, Doug "Frank Sweetser" <fs@WPI.EDU> Sent by: wlug-bounces@mail.wlug.org 03/01/2006 09:40 AM Please respond to "Worcester Linux Users Group" <wlug@mail.wlug.org> To "Worcester Linux Users Group" <wlug@mail.wlug.org> cc Subject Re: [Wlug] Perl puzzle On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 09:30:26AM -0500, douglas.r.aker@verizon.com wrote:
The obvious s/, "/"/g doesn't work, nor does escaping the double-quotes, as in s/, \"/\"/g
Try $target =~ s/,\s\"/\"/g; -- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that WPI Network Engineer | is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug