Escaping single quote in $string

calebcall has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a script that searches for media files to convert. These files could contain apostrophes in their name (i.e. the TV Show, How It's Made). That apostrophe (single quote) makes my script bomb out. What I need to do is escape it or remove it from the file name. I've tried the following, but none of them work. I'm sure I'm just doing something wrong.

$string =~ s/'/\\'/g;

$string =~ s/\'/\\'/g;

$string =~ s/\'//g;

Any help?

Thanks

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Re: Escaping single quote in $string by moritz (Cardinal) on Feb 17, 2013 at 20:48 UTC
How do those not work? How does `$string` look before and after, and what would you have expected? What do you escape it for? (shell? SQL? some other target language?) Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Escaping single quote in $string by tangent (Parson) on Feb 17, 2013 at 21:15 UTC
To remove the quote the third one you have there should work, as long as you don't do either of the first two beforehand: `my $string = "How It's Made"; $string =~ s/\'//g; print "$string\n"; # prints "How Its Made"` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Escaping single quote in $string by manorhce (Beadle) on Feb 17, 2013 at 21:57 UTC
Hey calebcall I think you have not tried with the last match you have mentioned. `my $string = q/hi it's mine test ' correct/; print $string if $string =~ s#\'#is#g;` [download] Thanks, Mano	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Escaping single quote in $string by calebcall (Sexton) on Feb 17, 2013 at 22:10 UTC
Ok, I re-looked at what I was doing and I'm starting to see what my problem is. So what I'm doing is assigning $infile to $outfile and changing the extension on outfile, then plugging those in to handbrakeCLI to do the conversion. I was trying to do the search and replace on the $outfile, when I should be doing it on the $infile. So, it looks like as of now, it seems to be working. Thanks	[reply]
Re^2: Escaping single quote in $string by Anonymous Monk on Feb 17, 2013 at 23:23 UTC
Write to existing file with character insert (tags: in place edit EDIT AND BACKUP FILES SAFELY ARGV::readonly Iterator::Diamond Iterator::Files -pi.orig -pi.bak )	[reply]
Re^2: Escaping single quote in $string by Anonymous Monk on Feb 18, 2013 at 17:00 UTC
I take it you're using the `system($string)` syntax (or similar) for calling out to handbrake? Have you tried the `system(@list)` syntax? It doesn't involve the shell, so you don't need to escape the file names.	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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