How can I find and replace html links with Notepad++?

Are you a PERL WIZARD? IS PERL THE RIGHT LANGUAGE FOR ME TO LEARN?

• Are you a PERL WIZARD? IS PERL THE RIGHT LANGUAGE FOR ME TO LEARN? I'm in ecommerce for small business folks developing Yahoo Stores which means all of the infrastructure is taken care of by Yahoo. I'm not necessarily interested in the CGI-bin aspects of PERL, but I like the idea of being able to spot check Yahoo Servers to see if they are up and running, spider/scrape content off manufacturer sites, etc. I do a lot of batch processing of anywhere from 50 to 15,000 database records (of products) to create Yahoo! Stores. I'll take data from XML to CSV into EXCEL into NOTEPAD into WORD and back into to EXCEL to add/remove formatting, strip html, etc. I write batch programs to rename 1000 of product images the "correct" ID. I have to globally find and replace characters across pretty big databases. I'd also like to be able to maintain large databases of keywords and their conversion rates for multiple retail stores. Can I do all of this with PERL? I got the CAMEL & the LLAMA books (and a newt? and one other) from AMAZON last week and started to poke around this weekend. HELP!

• Answer:

  ystore, Perl (generally spelled with only the first letter capitalized, though thought by some to be an acronym for Practical Extracting and Reporting Language) is the friend of millions of programmers around the world. There are languages with better structure, languages that compile faster, and languages that just plain make more sense. But where Perl really stands out is its flexibility, a feature that allows you to do things several orders of magnitudes faster than other languages. In my personal experience, I have been able to do things with Perl in mere hours that would have taken me several days or even weeks to do any other way. The Camel Book's (Programming Perl by Larry Wall, Tom Christtiansen & Randal L. Schwartz) Preface does a great job of summing up the strong points of Perl, a portion of which I will quote here: "In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible. And what are these 'easy jobs' that ought to be easy? The ones you do every day, of course. You want a language that makes it easy to manipulate numbers and text, files and directories, computers and networks, and especially programs. It should be easy to run external programs and scan their output for interesting tidbits. It should be easy to send those same tidbits off to other programs that can do special things with them. It should be easy to develop, modify, and debug your own programs too. And, of course, it should be easy to compile and run your programs, and do it portably, on any modern operating system. Perl does all that, and a whole lot more." Whether you are using Windows, Linux, Macintosh, UNIX, even other esoteric operating systems like BeOS and OS/2 Warp, you can run Perl, and in most cases compile the same code you write on one system directly on another. In most cases, the things you want to do in Perl have already been mostly done for you, thanks to the extensive code libraries available in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) Perl particularly excels in manipulating data, with extremely powerful regular expression and text management functionality. As a practical example, a global search and replace over an entire filesystem can be done with a single line of text, combining UNIX and Perl to replace, for example, every occurance of a web domain throughout an HTML site: find -name *.html | xargs perl -pi -e 's/cvs.oldserver.com/cvs.newserver.org/g' The Camel and the Llama (Learning Perl) books are a great start for learning the fundamentals. You will also want to research the CPAN site in great detail. Once you learn the basics, the possibilities for using Perl will be limited only by your imagination. In closing, to quote once more from the Camel, "Perl is a language for getting your job done." If you do any serious work with computers, no amount of time studying and working with Perl could ever be considered wasted. Sites Cited: CPAN http://www.cpan.org/ Global Search and Replace With Perl: http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/73 Google Search Strategy: perl xargs global search replace