[olug] Character Removal

[Jay Hannah]

Carl Lundstedt wrote:
> 1...2...3...4...I smell a scripting war!!!

Guilty!

Obi-Wan wrote:
> Perl has its uses, but is overly bloated for such a simple operation.
> Sed(1) does a wonderful job of this sort of thing.  Assuming you want
> to keep the first and last parentheses:
>
> # echo "abc (asdf) asdf (asdf) 1234 (xyz) 67" | sed -e 's/([^)]*)[^)]*)/()/'
> abc () 1234 (xyz) 67
>   

Overly bloated? Instead of

   sed -e

use

   perl -ple

and escape any parens outside of []'s.

Now sed and perl do the exact same thing in your examples.

So when specifically hunting parens I concede sed is less line-noisy. 
But "overly bloated"? Really? -poke- -laugh-

j
Omaha Perl Mongers: http://omaha.pm.org