View Subcategory
Strings
Manipulation

Reverse the characters in a string

Given the string "reverse me", produce the string "em esrever"
perl
$_ = reverse "reverse me"; print

Reverse the words in a string

Given the string "This is a end, my only friend!", produce the string "friend! only my end, the is This"
perl
$reversed = join ' ', reverse split / /, $text;

Text wrapping

Wrap the string "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. " repeated ten times to a max width of 78 chars, starting each line with "> ", yielding this result:

> The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps
> over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The
> quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps
> over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The
> quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps
> over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The
> quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
perl
use Text::Wrap;
$text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. ";
$Text::Wrap::columns = 73;
print wrap('> ', '> ', $text x 10);
$_ = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. " x 10;
s/(.{0,70}) /> $1\n/g;
print;

Remove leading and trailing whitespace from a string

Given the string "  hello    " return the string "hello".
perl
my $string = " hello ";
$string =~ s{
\A\s* # Any number of spaces at the start of the string
(.+?) # Remember any number of characters until we reach
\s*\z # any number of spaces at the end of the string
}{
$1 # Leave the characters we remembered
}x;
my $string = " hello ";
$string =~ s{\A\s*}{};
$string =~ s{\s*\z}{};

#Modification History:
# 2009-MAR-17: GGARIEPY: [creation] (geoff.gariepy@gmail.com)

$string = " hello ";
$string =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g; # All the action happens in one regex!

# Regex Notes:
# ^ - anchors to the beginning of the string
# $ - anchors to the end of the string
# g - causes regex to match as many times as possible
# | - logical OR

Simple substitution cipher

Take a string and return the ROT13 and ROT47 (Check Wikipedia) version of the string.
For example:
String is: Hello World #123
ROT13 returns: Uryyb Jbeyq #123
ROT47 returns: w6==@ (@C=5 R`ab
perl
sub rot13 {
my $str = shift;
$str =~ tr/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/;
return $str;
}

sub rot47 {
my $str = shift;
$str =~ tr/!-~/P-~!-O/;
return $str;
}

my $string = 'Hello World #123';

print "$string\n";
print rot13($string)."\n";
print rot47($string)."\n";