Re: [MacPerl] regular expressions and formatting text

[Detlef Lindenthal]

=Katherine Richmond wrote:

> So I used this regular expression to replace 2 or more consecutive spaces with
> one space:
>
> $textline =~ s/\s{2,}/ /g;

=cut




##  Maybe this can help you?

## Sample:
$_ = "first                       line
     second                line
third      line
1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";

## Filter:
s,[\040\011]+, ,g;   ## reduce spaces or tabs to one space
                     ## same as:    s,[  ]+, ,g;
s,\n\040+,\n,g;      ## erase leading blanks
s,\040+\n,\n,g;      ## erase trailing blanks

## print:
print;


=Remarks:
\s  means whitespace, which includes
  space           == chr(32) == \040
  tab             == chr(9)  == \011
  vertical tab    == chr(11) == \013
  line feed       == chr(10) == \012
  carriage return == chr(13) == \015 .

Because you want to leave line feeds as they are,
do not use  \s  ,  but invoce space and tab
expressively: \040\011.



Detlef