Help regarding Regular Expression

[pankajit09]

I have a string like -->
23232006-23-2323:12:12dsds-we-ew:wes.doc

I want a regex which can remove the : and - only in the numerical part like -->
232320062323231212dsds-we-ew:wes.doc

[pankajit09]

to make ur work easy I want the regex to have effeect only till first 22 places for eg:- 23232323-23-2312:23:23ewew-sds-wew-wew.doc

the numerical part is always fixed for 22 places.

[pankajit09]

ok no need to think .

I got the solution -->

substr($expr,0,22) =~ s/[:-]//g; 

[miller]

substr($expr,0,22) =~ s/[:-]//g; 

That is a very elegant solution. I've never actually seen substr used as an lvalue in quite that way before, so I'm glad that you posted your question. You could simplify the regex slightly by removing any non-digits instead of explicitly specifying [:-]

substr($expr,0,22) =~ s/\D//g;
 

Alternatively, I was going to suggest that you use lookahead and lookbehind assertions, but your method is much clearer given your expanded specification. Nevertheless, an alternative method:

$expr =~ s/(?<=\d)\D(?=\d)//g;