Can I substitute multiple items in a single regular expression in VIM or Perl?

Question

Let\'s say I have string \"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog\" can I change this to \"The slow brown fox jumps over the energetic dog\" with one regular expression

Answer 1

The second part of a substitution is a double quoted string, so any normal interpolation can occur. This means you can use the value of the capture to index into a hash:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;


my %replace = (
    quick => "slow",
    lazy  => "energetic",
);

my $regex = join "|", keys %replace;
$regex = qr/$regex/;

my $s = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";

$s =~ s/($regex)/$replace{$1}/g;

print "$s\n";