Removing dots - please help me out

[Aristotle]

Could you please help me out with regular expressions. I'm trying to
write a perl script that proccesses some text, and i'm stuck at the
following:

need to remove from the text
1. dots followed by space & words starting with lower case letters
2. dots followed by only by words starting with lower case letters

ie

"pure text here bla bla bla. more text follows" --> changes to
"pure text here bla bla bla more text follows"

and

"pure text here bla bla bla.more text follows" --> changes to
"pure text here bla bla bla more text follows"

Need to remove just the dots, not letters.

No matter how hard i tried, i could not make it work. Tried various
things eg $line =~ s/\. (?=[a-z])/ /g; I'd really appreciate your
help, it's a must do and dont have anyone else to help out.

Thanks in advance.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Re: Removing dots - please help me out

Aristotle wrote:[color=blue]
> need to remove from the text
> 1. dots followed by space & words starting with lower case letters
> 2. dots followed by only by words starting with lower case letters
>
> ie
>
> "pure text here bla bla bla. more text follows" --> changes to
> "pure text here bla bla bla more text follows"
>
> and
>
> "pure text here bla bla bla.more text follows" --> changes to
> "pure text here bla bla bla more text follows"
>
> Need to remove just the dots, not letters.
>
> No matter how hard i tried, i could not make it work. Tried various
> things eg $line =~ s/\. (?=[a-z])/ /g;[/color]

You seem to be close, but since the dot may or may not be followed by
a space, you'd better say so:

s/\. ?(?=[a-z])/ /g;
---------^

HTH

--
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
Email: http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/contact.pl

[Aristotle]

Re: Removing dots - please help me out

Thanks, it does seem to work correctly.
However, there are still some dots that are not being removed,
for example when there is a 'return' after the dot:

"Asthma in children of sycotic parents ( Nat .
s ) Spasms of the glottis with clucking in the larynx ; air "

Ofcourse i'm using first
$line =~ s/\n//g;
in order to remove the return characters and then
$line =~ s/\. ?(?=[a-z])/ /g;
but these dots still escape.

Any ideas why it doesnt work ?


[color=blue]
>Gunnar Hjalmarsson <noreply@gunnar .cc> wrote in message news:<HVH5c.525 20$mU6.
> You seem to be close, but since the dot may or may not be followed by
> a space, you'd better say so:
>
> s/\. ?(?=[a-z])/ /g;
> ---------^[/color]

[Aristotle]

Re: Removing dots - please help me out

Please ignore my last message about some dots after returns, escaping the regex.
It was my mistake, needed to re-apply the regex a second time at a different point.
Thnx