On 22/2/2006, at 9:21, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

...

But when I run the command none of the tabs or newlines I've specified in the replace section of the command are applied to the text in question [...]

[...]

1. It searches each line separately, in which case it won't match

the multiline search you are performing

That’s exactly it! :)

The -p switch puts a loop around the perl code, which execute that code for each line in the input (stdin).

So: perl -pe 'foo' translates to:

for each line in the input print result of running “foo” on line

Loops and such are generally easier in Ruby, so instead try:

ruby -e ' print STDIN.read.gsub( /^([A-Z]+.*[A-Z]*\s*)\n((.+))\n(.+)$/, "\n\n\t\t\t\t\1\n\t\t\t\2\n\n\3" ) '

So what’s s/«regexp»/«replacement»/ in Perl is sub(/«pattern»/, «replacement») in Ruby. And instead of adding ‘g’ as option to make it “global”, we use gsub.

In addition, in Ruby we have to use \1 instead of $1 etc.

In Perl the s/«regexp»/«replacement»/ runs on the $_ variable (which is the current line, when used with the -p switch). Ruby has a similar feature (both -p and $_ as “accumulator” reguster), but in the above we explicitly call gsub on all we read from STDIN, instead of doing it line-by-line.

Oliver,

By default, Perl's -p switch causes each line of the input to be

1. read, 2. operated on by whatever commands are given (typically an s///), and 3. printed.

So, as Paul McCann said, Perl can't do what you want it to because the command is seeing only one line of input at a time. To operate on the whole file at once, use the -0777 switch. Using -000 to read a paragraph at a time would work for this specific case, but -0777 is usually the more general solution.

I am wondering, though, why you are trying to do this as a one-liner. As far as I know, bundle commands can start with a "shebang" line, so you can use a full, multiline Perl program if the command starts with #!/usr/bin/perl. Thus:

#!/usr/bin/perl local $/; # put Perl in "slurp" mode $text = <>; # read in the whole file $text =~ s/^([A-Z ]+)\n((.+))\n(.+)$/\n\n\t\t\t\t$1\n\t\t\t$2\n \n$3/mg; print $text;

should do the trick. I changed the first part of your regex so the capitalized line can contain only capital (unaccented) letters and spaces, which is what I thought you wanted. The '.*' you have in your regex allows any character in that line.

FYI, the 'g' option at the end of the substitution command makes the substitution work for every instance of the pattern rather than just the first. The 'm' option allows ^ and $ to match beginnings and endings of lines in multiline text. It's common to see the 's' option in multiline regexes, but that would break this one; it allows '.' to match the newline character, and we're relying on '.' *not* matching newline.

I meant to mention yesterday that the most commonly recommended reference on regexes is Friedl's _Mastering Regular Expressions_ from O'Reilly. It's probably more encyclopedic than you want, but it's very highly regarded. For Perl-specific regex help, there are any number of tutorials on the Internet. There's also _Programming Perl_ from O'Reilly and the 'perlre' man page.

On Feb 22, 2006, at 7:32 AM, Paul McCann wrote:

Hi Oliver,

...

I'm trying to run a perl search/replace command via a 'bundle command'. I've entered the following into the 'Edit Command' box:

perl -pe ' s/^([A-Z]+.*[A-Z]*\s*)\n((.+))\n(.+)$/\n\n\t\t\t\t$1\n\t\t\t$2\n \n$3/g; '

I've set the input to 'Entire Document' and the output to 'Create New Document'.

The problem there is that the text won't be matching. You need to indicate to perl that you want a multiline match to occur (ie, that the regular expression should apply to all of the text in the document, not just one line at a time). This is done by using the "m" qualifier, as in

...

perl -pe 's/^([A-Z]+.*[A-Z]*\s*)\n((.+))\n(.+)$/\n\n\t\t\t\t$1\n \t\t\t$2\n\n$3/mg;'

But written this way perl is just seeing the first line of the document; in order for it to see a paragraph at a time (where a paragraph is delimited by a blank line) you can use the flag "-000" (three zeroes):

...

perl -000 -pe 's/^([A-Z]+.*[A-Z]*\s*)\n((.+))\n(.+)$/\n\n\t\t\t\t $1\n\t\t\t$2\n\n$3/mg;'

This gets you pretty close to what you're seeking, and I imagine you can tweak it to get it exactly right:

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

		OLIVER
	(I want to tell you)

I've got things to say. Dr. Robert

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

Good luck, Paul

-- Dr. Drang