Add a new line in a variable using perl - perl

Question

I am trying to add a new line in a variable after certain number of words. For example: If we have a variable:
$x = "This a variable, start a new line here, This is a new line.";
If I print the above variable
print $x;
I should get the below output:
This is a variable,
start a new line here,
This is a new line.
How can I achieve this in Perl from the variable itself?

Answer 1

I do not agree to the formula "after certain number of words".
Note that the first target line has 4 words, whereas remaining 2 have
5 words each.
Actually you need to replace each comma and following sequence of
spaces (if any) with a comma and \n.
So the intuitive way to do it is:
$x =~ s/,\s*/,\n/g;

Answer 2

The simplest way is to split the string on comma followed by a space and then
join the word groups with a comma followed by a newline.
my $x = "This a variable, start a new line here, This is a new line.";
print join(",\n", split /, /, $x) . "\n";
output
This a variable,
start a new line here,
This is a new line.
For solving the general, how do I reformat this string with line breaks after n-columns? problem, use the Text::Wrap library (as suggested by #ikegami):
use Text::Wrap;
my $x = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.";
$Text::Wrap::columns = 15;
# wrap() needs an array of words
my #words = split /\s+/, $x;
# Initial tab, subsequent tab values set to '' (think indent amount)
print wrap('', '', #words) . "\n";
output
The quick
brown fox
jumped over
the lazy dog.

Answer 3

You probably want to use regular expressions. You can do this:
$x =~ s/^(\S+\s+){3}\K/\n/;
Or if this is about the commas and not the spaces:
$x =~ s/^([^,]+,+){2}\s*\K/\n/;
(in this case I also remove any potential space that would be after the comma)
You can also configure separately how many words or comma you want, by putting this in a variable:
my $nbwords = 7; # add a line after the 7th word
$x =~ s/^(\S+\s+){$nbwords}\K/\n/;
Now, that would keep the last space so you may want to do this:
my $nbwords = 7; # add a line after the 7th word
$nbwords--; # becomes 6 because there is another word after that we match as well
$x =~ s/^(\S+\s+){$nbwords}\S+\K\s+/\n/;
You should probably learn to use Regexps but just to explain the above:
\s is any space character (like space, tab, line feed, etc)
\S (uppercase) is any character except a space character
+ means any number of characters of that type described with what is before. So \s+ means any number of consecutive space characters.
{123} means 123 times that type of character ...
{3,80} means 3 to 80 times. So + is equivalent to {1,} (one to unlimited)
\K means that whatever is before will not be replaced, only what is after.