Learning Perl, Second Edition

15.5. Transliteration

When you want to take a string and replace every instance of some character with some new character, or delete every instance of some character, you can already do that with carefully selected s/// commands. But suppose you had to change all of the a's into b's, and all of the b's into a's? You can't do that with two s/// commands because the second one would undo all of the changes the first one made.

From the UNIX shell, however, such a data transformation is simple: just use the standard tr (1) command:

tr ab ba <indata >outdata

(If you don't know anything about the tr command, please look at the tr (1) manpage; it's a useful tool for your bag of tricks.) Similarly, Perl provides a tr operator that works in much the same way:

tr/ab/ba/;

The tr operator takes two arguments: an old string and a new string. These arguments work like the two arguments to s///; in other words, there's some delimiter that appears immediately after the tr keyword that separates and terminates the two arguments (in this case, a slash, but nearly any character will do).

The arguments to the tr operator are similar to the arguments to the tr (1) command. The tr operator modifies the contents of the $_ variable (just like s///), looking for characters of the old string within the $_ variable. All such characters found are replaced with the corresponding characters in the new string. Here are some examples:

$_ = "fred and barney"; tr/fb/bf/; # $_ is now "bred and farney" tr/abcde/ABCDE/; ...