Subset regular expression substitution

[Nelson Ingersoll]

Greetings Fellow Mongers,

    I have a string which may, or may not, have parenthesis somewhere in 
the first 10 characters.  The string is always longer than 10 
characters.  I want to substitute space for either "(" or ")" or 
both.   Because that part of the string which beyond the tenth character is 
descriptive text, I dare not change any parenthesis after the first 10 
characters.  I understand the regex {$x =~ s/\(|\)/ /g;} matches any and 
all occurrences of either the '(' or ')' characters and replaces any '(' or 
')' with a space.

    The issue is, can I force the substitution, "s/\(|\)/ /g", to only work 
over the first 10 characters of $x rather than all characters?  Is this 
possible in a regex?   If not, I can always sub-string wing it.

    Your thoughts will be appreciated!

- Nelson ...

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