Using regex to add leading zeroes

Question

I would like to add a certain number of leading zeroes (say up to 3) to all numbers of a string. For example:

Input: /2009/5/song 01 of 12

Outpu

Answer 1

Here is a Perl solution without callbacks or recursion. It does use the Perl regex extension of execution of code in lieu of the straight substitution (the e switch) but this is very easily extended to other languages that lack that construct.

#!/usr/bin/perl

while () {
   chomp;
   print "string:\t\t\t$_\n";
# uncomment if you care about 0000000 case:
#   s/(^|[^\d])0+([\d])/\1\2/g;
#   print "now no leading zeros:\t$_\n";    
   s/(^|[^\d]{1,3})([\d]{1,3})($|[^\d]{1,3})/sprintf "%s%04i%s",$1,$i=$2,$3/ge;
   print "up to 3 leading zeros:\t$_\n";
}
print "\n";

__DATA__
/2009/5/song 01 of 12
/2010/10/song 50 of 99
/99/0/song 1 of 1000
1
01
001
0001
/001/
"02"
0000000000

Output:

string:                /2009/5/song 01 of 12
up to 3 leading zeros:  /2009/0005/song 0001 of 0012
string:                /2010/10/song 50 of 99
up to 3 leading zeros:  /2010/0010/song 0050 of 0099
string:                /99/0/song 1 of 1000
up to 3 leading zeros:  /0099/0/song 0001 of 1000
string:                1
up to 3 leading zeros:  0001
string:                01
up to 3 leading zeros:  0001
string:                001
up to 3 leading zeros:  0001
string:                0001
up to 3 leading zeros:  0001
string:                /001/
up to 3 leading zeros:  /0001/
string:                "02"
up to 3 leading zeros:  "0002"
string:                0000000000
up to 3 leading zeros:  0000000000