[Chicago-talk] Regex question

[Andy_Bach at wiwb.uscourts.gov]

> You're actually going to want to use it with a ? in there:

s/Hello.*,?/$ES/g;

> Otherwise it's greedy and will replace everything from Hello through the 
last comma 

Maybe a typo but:
s/Hello.*?,/$ES/g;

the "?" modifies the '*', in the original it was saying "zero or one 
commas" - and you'd need to replace the "Hello " text too.  the "/g" would 
mean there's possibly more than one "Hello ...." chunk in your letter?

Another good idiom is to use the negative char class for the marker 
s/Hello\s+[^,]+,/Hello $ES,/;

That is - "one or more of anything besides a comma" 

a
----------------------
Andy Bach
Systems Mangler
Internet: andy_bach at wiwb.uscourts.gov
Voice: (608) 261-5738; 
Cell: (608) 658-1890

"All that I care to know is that a man is a human being
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Mark Twain (1835-1910) 
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