How to use a regular expression to modify every element in an array

By Alvin J. Alexander, devdaily.com

I was just modifying a Perl program so I could use a regular expression to search for all less-than (<) and greater-than (>) symbols, and replace those with their HTML equivalents tags ("&lt;", and "&gt;", respectively). Here's the simple Perl code to perform this search-and-replace operation:

open(MY_FILE,$fileName);
my @fileContents = (<MY_FILE>);
close(MY_FILE);

for (@fileContents) 
{
  s/>/&gt\;/;
  s/</&lt\;/;
}

This Perl program does the following:

  1. Open a file, where the file is given by the variable $fileName.
  2. Read the contents of the file into the Perl array variable @fileContents.
  3. Closes the file.
  4. Loops through each element in the @fileContents array, and does the desired search-and-replace operations.

 
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