my @array = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6);
my $string = "ababbabaaba";
$string =~ s/a/shift(@array)/ge;

print $string; # prints "1b2bb3b45b6"
[download]

elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com

I have a suspicion that what you want to do is to fill a template.. in which case, rather than roll your own solution, you should check CPAN - there's a lot of modules that do a very good job of this:

• The absolutely fabulous shooting star Template Toolkit 2,
• Text::Template,
• Text::Templar,
• Text::FastTemplate,
• and if you want to generate specifically HTML, HTML::Template
• or the simplistic CGI::FastTemplate.

Of course, do give the solutions you got from the others a whirl to learn some more about regexen. :-) But for actually solving the task at hand the modules will do a better job in every aspect than a solution that you might write in a sane amount of time would. As a bonus, the "larger" ones of them offer a lot of power, so that you won't "grow out of" them anytime soon. (In fact I don't think one can grow out of TT2 at all..)

Makeshifts last the longest.

This works for me:

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict ;
use warnings ;

my @arr = qw/ cidaris see doing / ;

my $str = <<'EOD' ;
Hello, ##REPLACE##.
Nice to ##REPLACE## you.
How are you ##REPLACE## today?
EOD

my $i = 0 ;
$str =~ s/##REPLACE##/$arr[$i++]/g ;

print $str ;
[download]

use strict;
use warnings;

my @array = qw (zero one two);
my $str = "blah ##REP0## blah ##REP1##\nblah ##REP2##\n";

$str =~ s/##REP(\d+?)##/$array[$1]/g;

print $str;
[download]

Update: Another idea is to replace the ##*##'s with %s and do:

$str = sprintf ($str, @array);

Just a thought ...

Zenon Zabinski | zdog | zdog@perlmonk.org