How can i detect symbols using regular expression in perl? - perl

Question

Please how can i use regular expression to check if word starts or ends with a symbol character, also how to can i process the text within the symbol.
Example:
(text) or te-xt, or tex't. or text?
change it to
(<t>text</t>) or <t>te-xt</t>, or <t>tex't</t>. or <t>text</t>?
help me out?
Thanks

Answer 1

I assume that "word" means alphanumeric characters from your example? If you have a list of permitted characters which constitute a valid word, then this is enough:
my $string = "x1 .text1; 'text2 \"text3;\"";
$string =~ s/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/<t>$1<\/t>/g;
# Add more to character class [a-zA-Z0-9] if needed
print "$string\n";
# OUTPUT: <t>x1</t> .<t>text1</t>; '<t>text2</t> "<t>text3</t>;"
UPDATE
Based on your example you seem to want to DELETE dashes and apostrophes, if you want to delete them globally (e.g. whether they are inside the word or not), before the first regex, you do
$string =~ s/['-]//g;

Answer 2

I am using DVK's approach here, but with a slight modification. The difference is that her/his code would also put the tags around all words that don't contain/are next to a symbol, which (according to the example given in the question) is not desired.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
sub modify {
my $input = shift;
my $text_char = 'a-zA-Z0-9\-\''; # characters that are considered text
# if there is no symbol, don't change anything
if ($input =~ /^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$/) {
return $input;
}
else {
$input =~ s/([$text_char]+)/<t>$1<\/t>/g;
return $input;
}
}
my $initial_string = "(text) or te-xt, or tex't. or text?";
my $expected_string = "(<t>text</t>) or <t>te-xt</t>, or <t>tex't</t>. or <t>text</t>?";
# version BEFORE edit 1:
#my #aux;
# take the initial string apart and process it one word at a time
#my #string_list = split/\s+/, $initial_string;
#
#foreach my $string (#string_list) {
# $string = modify($string);
# push #aux, $string;
#}
#
# put the string together again
#my $final_string = join(' ', #aux);
# ************ EDIT 1 version ************
my $final_string = join ' ', map { modify($_) } split/\s+/, $initial_string;
if ($final_string eq $expected_string) {
print "it worked\n";
}
This strikes me as a somewhat long-winded way of doing it, but it seemed quicker than drawing up a more sophisticated regex...
EDIT 1: I have incorporated the changes suggested by DVK (using map instead of foreach). Now the syntax highlighting is looking even worse than before; I hope it doesn't obscure anything...

Answer 3

This takes standard input and processes it to and prints on Standard output.
while (<>) {
s {
( [a-zA-z]+ ) # word
(?= [,.)?] ) # a symbol
}
{<t>$1</t>}gx ;
print ;
}
You might need to change the bit to match the concept of word.
I have use the x modifeid to allow the regexx to be spaced over more than one line.
If the input is in a Perl variable, try
$string =~ s{
( [a-zA-z]+ ) # word
(?= [,.)?] ) # a symbol
}
{<t>$1</t>}gx ;