How do I repeat a character n times in a string?

Question

I am learning Perl, so please bear with me for this noob question.

How do I repeat a character n times in a string?

I want to do something like below:

Answer 1

By default, substitutions take a string as the part to substitute. To execute code in the substitution process you have to use the e flag.

$numOfChar = 10;

s/^(.*)/' ' x $numOfChar . $1/e;

This will add $numOfChar space to the start of your text. To do it for every line in the text either use the -p flag (for quick, one-line processing):

cat foo.txt | perl -p -e "$n = 10; s/^(.*)/' ' x $n . $1/e/" > bar.txt

or if it's a part of a larger script use the -g and -m flags (-g for global, i.e. repeated substitution and -m to make ^ match at the start of each line):

$n = 10;
$text =~ s/^(.*)/' ' x $n . $1/mge;