How to use the chr function inside a regular expression in Perl?

Question

I have a Perl script which has a string which may or may not contain character 146 in the ASCII character codes. I'm interested in using the chr() function inside a regular expression to find out if that string really does contain that character. If the character is there, I would like to substitute it with a "'" character.

Is this possible? If not what's another way to do this?

This one has my stumped. Thanks!

The title is somewhat misleading. This is not so much about using chr() in regex but about using special characters in regex. — vog, Mar 05 '11 at 01:58

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 05 '11 at 01:55

You can substitute variables into patterns:

$c = chr(146);
$target =~ s/$c/'/go; # "o" means $c won't change so remember it

but usually you would specify it as a literal by converting it to octal or hex:

$target =~ s/\222/'/g; # octal
$target =~ s/\x92/'/g; # hex

How to use the chr function inside a regular expression in Perl?

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