perl: replace multiple word on a line

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All,

If I have a line as following:
( MA "vertical" )

How can I convert it to as below:
( BC "horizontal" )

Thanks,
--Michael

2 
sed 's/( MA "vertical" )/( BC "horizontal" )/' input_file
3

thanks for quick respond.

I forgot to mention that the whitespace between the words MA and "vertical" could be different from line to line.
I am looking for a perl sample.

4

Try this

perl -pi -e 's/\( MA.*\"vertical\" \)/( BC "horizontal" )/g' filename
5

Let me describe the problem in different way:

I want to process a file which have multiple lines as below:

( word1 "word2" )
(worda "wordb")
...

I want to convert word1/worda - to $newWord1 and word2/wordb->to $newWord2 and the rest chars including the white space still keep the same on each line.

A sample Perl code for convert one line is good enough like:
$line = ( word1 "word2" )
the result will be
$line = ( newWord1 "newWord2" )

Thanks,
--Michael

6

Let's say your data file looks like this:

$
$ cat data
( MA "vertical" )
( Unix     "Windows" )
( MA     "Boston" )
$
$

And you want to perform the following conversions:

MA       => BC
vertical => horizontal
Unix     => Apple
Windows  => Microsoft
Boston   => Victoria

You could put all that information as key->value pairs in a Perl hash. Then loop through the file, search for keys using regex and replace those keys by their corresponding values from the hash.

The Perl one-liner and its test run follow:

$
$ # contents of the data file
$ cat data
( MA "vertical" )
( Unix     "Windows" )
( MA     "Boston" )
$
$ # Run the Perl one-liner on the data file
$ perl -lne 'BEGIN {%x = ( "MA"       => "BC",
                           "vertical" => "horizontal",
                           "Unix"     => "Apple",
                           "Windows"  => "Microsoft",
                           "Boston"   => "Victoria"
                         )}
             print "($1$x{$2}$3\"$x{$4}\"$5)" if /^\((\s+)(\w+)(\s+)"(\w+)"(\s+)\)$/
            ' data
( BC "horizontal" )
( Apple     "Microsoft" )
( BC     "Victoria" )
$
$
$

tyler_durden

7

Thanks Tyler
Your code works for me.
Appreciate that.

--Michael