As a Perl geek, I am obligated to respond.
On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 08:02:26AM -0500, Charles Daminato wrote:
> Since ' and \ characters are 'recognized' in a regex, you have to escape
> them in your stream:
>
> perl -pi.bak -e 's/\'/\\\'/g' file(s)
That won't work - you'll confuse the shell. You could try:
perl -pi.bak -e "s/'/\\\\'/g"
or
perl -pi.bak -e 's/'\''/\\'\''/g'
both of which are very ugly. But I suspect he meant that he wanted
to do it in a program, so he would just be writing:
$whatever =~ s/(['\\])/\\$1/g;
Then again, the guy didn't say what he meant by "escape". In SQL, for
example, the correct "escape" for ' is ''. In addition, when someone
asks a question like this, they're rarely asking the whole question.
I bet he needs more than just to put backslashes in front of two
characters. He may even be trying to sanitize user input before
passing it to system() or something, in which case he hasn't read the
documentation and will end up writing security holes no matter what we
tell him.
In addition, rather than reinventing the wheel, there's the Perl
quotameta function, the HTML::Entities and URI::Escape modules, and
the DBI module's "quote" method, depending on the circumstances.
--
Christopher Masto Senior Network Monkey NetMonger Communications
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.netmonger.net
Free yourself, free your machine, free the daemon -- http://www.freebsd.org/
