Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The omission of Perl from this post was pretty striking - not even mentioned in the final thoughts (instead thought to do the whole thing in awk??).

Perl has fallen from grace as a general programming language and even as a systems administration language, but it's still absolutely the best and most ubiquitous tool for text manipulation.



Can you write a Perl program to replace the content of anything found inside double-quotes with the result of piping it to the command `fmt`?


Easily, though you don't need to drag external programs like fmt into it - perl comes with a standard module for word wrapping.

Text::Balanced (for extracting the quoted text) and Text::Wrap would be the core of such a program.

https://perldoc.perl.org/Text::Balanced

https://perldoc.perl.org/Text::Wrap


Could you write it for me as a one-liner? I’d like to learn more Perl and this would help.


Oh, I wouldn't try to squeeze it down into a one liner. Maybe for a simple definition of the quoted text that doesn't need to account for edge cases like escaped quotes inside...


Just a normal program then? No edge cases needed




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: