Please do pardon me if my question sounds a bit awkward. I am looking for a regex which will replace line numbers in perl source file without affecting values assigned to scalars.
I think below will make my question a little bit clearer. Say I have a perl source which looks like this:
1. $foo = 2.4;
2. print $foo;
I would like a regular expression to replace those line numbers (1. 2. etc..) without affecting value assigned to scalars, and so in this case $foo.
Thanks
anchor your regexp to the start of the line:
to remove the numbers:
perl -p -i.bak -e's{^\d+\. }{}' myperl
Within a perl regex you can use the caret symbol ^ to represent the start of a line. $ represents the end of a line. These are known as anchors.
So to find a number \d at the beginning of a line (only) you can search for
/^\d+/
If you wanted to remove those numbers you can "replace" them with nothing, as in
s/^\d+//g
You also want to include the dot after the number, so you might try ;
/^\d+./
But in regex a dot represents "any character" so you will need to escape the dot to have it interpreted literally
/^\d+\./
The caret symbol ^ also serves double-duty in character sets (it negates them), I only mention this as it is a common source of confusion when learning regex.
/[^\d]/ # Match characters that are not digits
s/^\d//;will remove all numbers only at the start of a line.