Oliver wrote...

I tried that, but this does not allow me to use "^" to denote the beginning of a line, which is critical to some of the search/replace things I'm doing.

In a multiline string you need to tell the perl interpreter that "^" should match the beginning of a line within the string: to do that add the "m" ("multiline") flag to your regular expression. You probably also want to add a "g" ("global") flag to replace every occurrence in the (big, multiline) string.

So something like

perl -pe 'BEGIN{$/=undef}; s/^\d+/some_digits /mg'

will replace any digits at the beginning of any lines of your text with the string "some_digits ".

Here's another example that might help make things clearer

======================================================================== #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $string = "Something\nwith\nembedded newlines"; $string =~s/^(.)/* Beginning with $1 : $1/gm;

print $string; ======================Output=====================================

* Beginning with S : Something * Beginning with w : with * Beginning with e : embedded newlines

========================================================================

The only other flag of interest in such substitutions is the "s" ("single line(?)") flag, which allows the "." (ie, dot) metacharacter to match a newline character. (Usually it won't match a newline.)This is useful if you wish to match something that can break across lines, or something that *has* to bridge lines.

Cheers, Paul