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"123 456" to "123456"

drothman66
Novice

Mar 4, 2010, 11:24 AM

Post #1 of 10 (18699 views)

"123 456" to "123456"	Can't Post

i know..it's probably simple, but i know how to find 3nums, space, 3nums within a larger string...

i just don't know how to elim (with regex) the space so that "123 456" becomes "123456".

thanks.

(This post was edited by drothman66 on Mar 4, 2010, 11:32 AM)

toolic
User

Mar 4, 2010, 5:36 PM

Post #2 of 10 (18678 views)

Re: [drothman66] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

You could use the substitution operator:

Code

my $str = '123 456'; 
$str =~ s/\s//;

drothman66
Novice

Mar 4, 2010, 5:38 PM

Post #3 of 10 (18677 views)

Re: [toolic] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

that only works when the string is the "123 456".

i need an idiom for when the construct is part of a longer string, ala:

"hello 123 456 goodbye" becomes
"hello 123456 goodbye"

toolic
User

Mar 4, 2010, 5:41 PM

Post #4 of 10 (18676 views)

Re: [drothman66] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Regexp-Quote-Like-Operators

rovf
Veteran

Mar 5, 2010, 4:55 AM

Post #5 of 10 (18636 views)

Re: [drothman66] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

You can use parenthesis to capture your 3-digit string groups, and then use backreferences to glue them together again. For instance, to remove every sequence of spaces which occurs between digits, I would use

$mystring =~ s/(\d)\s+(\d)/$1$2/g

shawnhcorey
Enthusiast

Mar 5, 2010, 5:59 AM

Post #6 of 10 (18629 views)

Re: [drothman66] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

Try:

Code

#!/usr/bin/perl 
 
use strict; 
use warnings; 
 
my $text = "hello 123 456 goodbye"; 
print "$text\n"; 
 
$text =~ s{ (?<=[[:digit:]]{3}) \s+ (?=[[:digit:]]{3}) }{}msx; 
print "$text\n";

__END__

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drothman66
Novice

Mar 5, 2010, 9:54 AM

Post #7 of 10 (18616 views)

Re: [shawnhcorey] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

not only does that work, it works for all the cases i can think of (when i add the g switch). this is great..thanks....

my purpose, by the way, is to clean up poorly entered phone numbers that i'm am sucking in directly from a series of Excel spreadsheets.

i simply want to grab the numbers and eliminate "()\c-" (which i can simply do sequentially with your idiom). When they're imported back into excel, excel can format them correctly.

as i'm grabbing records as strings and dumping them to a .csv, i needed something which would work on more than just one field.

thanks again

drothman66
Novice

Mar 5, 2010, 12:50 PM

Post #8 of 10 (18607 views)

Re: [drothman66] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

Hi. I played around with the syntax, but can't quite get this similar (but easier problem):

"hello (123) goodbye" becomes:

"hello 123 goodbye"

i'd then be able to deal with most of the cases (in multiple passes, but that's ok. thanks again.

shawnhcorey
Enthusiast

Mar 5, 2010, 4:07 PM

Post #9 of 10 (18598 views)

Re: [drothman66] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

Try:

Code

#!/usr/bin/perl 
 
use strict; 
use warnings; 
 
my $text = "hello (123) goodbye"; 
print "$text\n"; 
 
$text =~ s{ \( ([[:digit:]]{3}) \) }{$1}msx; 
print "$text\n";

drothman66
Novice

Mar 6, 2010, 5:10 AM

Post #10 of 10 (18563 views)

Re: [shawnhcorey] "123 456" to "123456" [In reply to]	Can't Post

Got it. This one was much easier than last one. I've got some work to do to get from here to there...thanks again.

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