I have a string. It could contain anything a Perl string can contain. I have to print this string to a file and later bring it back in exactly as it was. However, because of the file format, the string in the file may not contain \n characters. That's the only difference between the two representations of this string.
Okay, obviously I need to replace all \n characters. Let's say I want to follow Perl's example and use a literal \ followed by a literal n. Then I would also need to escape \ characters. Okay, again we'll use Perl's \ and another \. Does that cover everything if \n is the only illegal character in my file format? I believe, so, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
The to file conversion seems simple given the above:
$string =~ s/\\/\\\\/g; $string =~ s/\n/\\n/g;
Does that work as good as I think it does?
Now I have to get it back out of the file and that's where it falls apart on me. I've tried things like:
$string =~ s/((?:^|[^\\])(?:\\\\)*)\\n/$1\n/g; $string =~ s/\\\\/\\/g;
While that gets close, it doesn't seem to work on everything. Here's an example (one-liner reformatted for easier reading):
perl -e ' $test = "\tFunky \"String\"\\\n\n";
print "String: $test\n";
$test =~ s/\\/\\\\/g;
$test =~ s/\n/\\n/g;
print "To File: $test\n";
$test =~ s/((?:^|[^\\])(?:\\\\)*)\\n/$1\n/g;
$test =~ s/\\\\/\\/g;
print "From File: $test\n" '
String: Funky "String"\
To File: Funky "String"\\\n\n From File: Funky "String"\ \n
Any advice is appreciated.
James
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