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From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Need detab function
Keywords: detab
Message-ID: <1990Nov20.175000.1407@iwarp.intel.com>
Date: 20 Nov 90 17:50:00 GMT
References: <1990Nov19.210123.20558@gtisqr.uucp>
Sender: news@iwarp.intel.com
Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Lines: 26
In-Reply-To: stu@gtisqr.uucp (Stu Donaldson)

In article <1990Nov19.210123.20558@gtisqr.uucp>, stu@gtisqr (Stu Donaldson) writes:
| I need a detab function written in perl.  I'm sure there must be
| something other than the brute force method of implimenting this.
| 
| Any help would be appreciated...
| 
| 	How about a one liner? :-)

Like maybe:

	perl -pe '1 while s/\t/" " x (8-length($`)%8)/e'

This is not the same as:

	perl -pe 's/\t/" " x (8-length($`)%8)/eg' # wrong!

Although I didn't test it, I recall something about length($`) being
wrong in a global edit, so I skipped that version.  The first one
works, however.

print "Just another Perl hacker,"
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
\=Cute Quote: "Intel: putting the 'backward' in 'backward compatible'..."====/