How can I substitute the nth occurrence of a match in a Perl regex?

Question

Following up from an earlier question on extracting the n\'th regex match, I now need to substitute the match, if found.

I thought that I could define the extraction

Answer 1

Or you can do something as this

use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = "'How can I','use' .... 'perl','to process this' 'line'";

my $cont =0;
sub replacen { # auxiliar function: replaces string if incremented counter equals $index
        my ($index,$original,$replacement) = @_;
        $cont++;
        return $cont == $index ? $replacement: $original;
}

#replace the $index n'th match (1-based counting) from $string by $rep
sub replace_quoted {
        my ($string, $index,$replacement) = @_;
        $cont = 0; # initialize match counter
        $string =~ s/'(.*?)'/replacen($index,$1,$replacement)/eg;
        return $string;
}

my $result = replace_quoted ( $string, 3 ,"PERL");
print "RESULT: $result\n";

A little ugly the "global" $cont variable, that could be polished, but you get the idea.

Update: a more compact version:

use strict;
my $string = "'How can I','use' .... 'perl','to process this' 'line'";

#replace the $index n'th match (1-based counting) from $string by $replacement
sub replace_quoted {
        my ($string, $index,$replacement) = @_;
        my $cont = 0; # initialize match counter
        $string =~ s/'(.*?)'/$cont++ == $index ? $replacement : $1/eg;
        return $string;
}

my $result = replace_quoted ( $string, 3 ,"PERL");
print "RESULT: $result\n";