From:	John W. Krahn	Date:	Wed Jul  1 05:47:09 2009
Subject:	Re: Substitution question

sanket vaidya wrote:
> Hi all,

Hello,

> As a part of one program I need to get the current working directory. So I
> get this using cwd(). I want to replace forward slash (/) by backslash (\)
> in the path which I get because I work on windows.

You shouldn't need to do that.

> Kindly look at the code below:
> 
> use warnings;
> use strict;
> use Cwd;
> 
> my $current_path = cwd();
> print "$current_path";
> 
> $current_path =~ s|/|\|;

That should be:

$current_path =~ s|/|\\|g;

Or:

$current_path =~ tr|/|\\|;

> print "$current_path";

perldoc -q quoting
Found in /usr/share/perl/5.8/pod/perlfaq4.pod

        The problem is that those double-quotes force stringification--
t
        want them to be strings.  Think of it this way: double-quote
        expansion is used to produce new strings.  If you already have a
        string, why do you need more?

        If you get used to writing odd things like these:

            print "$var";       # BAD

> When I run this I get the below error:
> Substitution replacement not terminated at line 8.

That is because a single backslash escapes the terminating delimiter.

> However if I replace 's|/|\|' with 's////\/' it works.

$ perl -e's////\/'
Search pattern not terminated at -e line 1.

It doesn't appear to work.

> Can anyone tell me why this happens & how to overcome it?


John
-- 
Those people who think they know everything are a great
annoyance to those of us who do.        -- Isaac Asimov