Using binding operator in perl - perl

Question

I am working on a program in perl and I am trying to combine more than one regex in a binding operator. I have tried using the syntax below but it's not working. I will like to know if there is any other way to go with this.
$in =~ (s/pattern/replacement/)||(s/pattern/replacement/)||...

Answer 1

You can often get a clue about what the Perl makes of some code using B::Deparse.
$ perl -MO=Deparse -E'$in =~ (s/pattern1/replacement1/)||(s/pattern2/replacement2/)'
[ ... snip ... ]
s/pattern2/replacement2/u unless $in =~ s/pattern1/replacement1/u;
-e syntax OK
So it's attempting your first substitution on $in. And if that fails, it is then trying your second substitution. But it's not using $in for the second substitution, it's using $_ instead.
You're running up against precedence issues here. Perl interprets your code as:
($in =~ s/pattern1/replacement1/) or (s/pattern2/replacement2/)
Notice that the opening parenthesis has moved before $in.
As others have pointed out, it's best to use a loop approach here. But I thought it might be useful to explain why your version didn't work.
Update: To be clear, if you wanted to use syntax like this, then you would need:
($in =~ s/pattern1/replacement1/) or
($in =~ s/pattern2/replacement2/);
Note that I've included $in =~ in each expression. At this point, it becomes obvious (I hope) why the looping solution is better.
However, because or is a short-circuiting operator, this statement will stop after the first successful substitution. I assumed that's what you wanted from your use of it in your original code. If that's not what you want, then you need to either switch to using and or (better, in my opinion) break them out into separate statements.
$in =~ s/pattern1/replacement1/;
$in =~ s/pattern2/replacement2/;

Answer 2

The closest you could get with a syntax looking similar to that would be
s/one/ONE/ or
s/two/TWO/ or
...
s/ten/TEN/ for $str;
This will attempt each substitution in turn, once only, stopping after the first successful one.

Answer 3

Use for to "topicalize" (alias $_ to your variable).
for ($in) {
s/pattern/replacement/;
s/pattern/replacement/;
}

Answer 4

A simpler way might be to create an array of all such patterns and replacements, then simply iterate through your array applying the substitution one pattern at a time.
my $in = "some string you want to modify";
my #patterns = (
['pattern to match', 'replacement string'],
# ...
);
$in = replace_many($in, \#patterns);
sub replace_many {
my ($in, $replacements) = #_;
foreach my $replacement ( #$replacements ) {
my ($pattern, $replace_string) = #$replacement;
$in =~ s/$pattern/$replace_string/;
}
return $in;
}

Answer 5

It's not at all clear what you need, and it's not at all clear that you can accomplish what you appear to want by the means you suggest. The OR operator is a short circuit operator, and you may not want this behavior. Please give an example of the input you expect, and the output you desire, hopefully several examples of each. Meanwhile, here is a test script.
use warnings;
use strict;
my $in1 = 'George Walker Bush';
my $in2 = 'George Walker Bush';
my $in3 = 'George Walker Bush';
my $in4 = 'George Walker Bush';
(my $out1 = $in1) =~ s/e/*/g;
print "out1 = $out1 \n";
(my $out2 = $in2) =~ s/Bush/Obama/;
print "out2 = $out2 \n";
(my $out3 = $in3) =~ s/(George)|(Bush)/Obama/g;
print "out3 = $out3\n";
$in4 =~ /(George)|(Walker)|(Bush)/g;
print "$1 - $2 - $3\n";
exit(0);
You will notice in the last case that only the first OR operator matches in the regular expression. If you wanted to replace 'George Walker Bush' with Barack Hussein Obama', you could do that easily enough, but you would also replace 'George Washington'with 'Barack Washington' - is this what you want? Here is the output of the script:
out1 = G*org* Walk*r Bush
out2 = George Walker Obama
out3 = Obama Walker Obama
Use of uninitialized value $2 in concatenation (.) or string at pq_151111a.plx line 19.
Use of uninitialized value $3 in concatenation (.) or string at pq_151111a.plx line 19.
George - -