Math operations in regex
I need to add a number to a backreference while doing a replace operation.
e.g. I am rewriting a URL
www.site.com/doc.asp?doc=321&language=1
to
www.site.com/headline/100321.article
I'm doing a simple replace, but I need to add 100,000 to the doc ID. What I have below works so far without adding anything.
s/.*doc=(\d+).*/www.site.com\/headline\/$1.article/g;
How can I add 100,000 to $1
?
Note, you can't just add 100
before the number because the doc ID might be > 999.
Solution 1:
using Perl:
s/.*doc=(\d+).*/"www.site.com\/headline\/".($1+100000).".article"/e;
as you've done with e flag, the right part becomes now an expression. so you have to wrap the non-capture part as strings.
Solution 2:
That's not possible in regex. Regex only matches patterns, it doesn't do arithmetic.
The best you can do is something verbose like:
match replace
(\d{6,}) $1
(\d{5}) 1$1
(\d{4}) 10$1
(\d{3}) 100$1
(\d{2}) 1000$1
(\d) 10000$1
Solution 3:
If you only have a few articles you could just brute force it
...doc=322 -> www.site.com/headline/100322.article
...doc=323 -> www.site.com/headline/100323.article
...doc=324 -> www.site.com/headline/100324.article
...etc
Math in regex, you see it here first.