Sub Help - dealing with hyphens

[perlcamp]

I have a file of records that look like this:

123-456,RTY,76-78,12-09-87,key

I would like to remove the hyphens from the first, and fourth values as delimited by commas but not the third value. So I would like to have the record look like this:

123456,RTY,76-78,120987,key

Can I do this using a Perl regular expression? I haven't had any luck, and I just end up stripping out all hyphens.

 

[rharsh]

Post the code that you have tried.

 

[perlcamp]

all i have tried was the simple sub command which is removing all hyphens:

perl -pi -e "s#-##g"

I know that isn't the answer. I have been searching for something that would do the subs, but only on the values first and fourth.

If you point me in the right direction I don't mind doing research. I just don't even know what topic to look for at this point.

 

[Annihilannic]

Something like this perhaps?

perl -pi -e '@a=split(/,/);$a[0]=~s/-//g;$a[3]=~s/-//g;$_=join(",",@a);'

In plain English... split the line up by commas into an array, do the replacements on specific members of the array, then join them together again ready to print.

Annihilannic.

 

[dkyrtata]

Try this: 's/-//; s/(\d\d)-(\d\d)-/$1$2/'