Shell Programming and Scripting

Code:

% print '<p>A policy insight into the&amp;#x2013; R&amp;Dpatent relationship</p>' |
perl -pe's/&amp;([^&]*?;)/&$1/' 
<p>A policy insight into the&#x2013; R&amp;Dpatent relationship</p>

i guess that would be fine.

but can you please help me to understand the code.

and please explain me why you did not use \gm at the end.

Code:

s/&([^&]*?;)/&$1/

substitute
the string & followed by
one or more characters different than &
the shortest match (?)
followed by a semicolon ;
(save the matched string ()
in the first back-reference)
with
the & character and
the content of the previously
saved match ($1)

You don't need the m modifier when using
the default record separator.

You don't need the g modifier unless you want
to substitute more matches on the same line.

Run perldoc perlre for more information on this topic.

thanks a ton.....