Shell Programming and Scripting

I am looking for a PERL expression to only replace the first two characters with another character. The first two characters can range from 10 to 35 and will be replaced by a letter based on the value of the two characters (e.g. 10 = A; 11 = B.......)

The problem I am having with the current regex is that it will replace all instances of the range in the string and I only need the first two characters to the left to be affected.

/10/A/A /11/B/A /12/C/A /13/D/A /14/E/A /15/F/A /16/G/A /17/H/A /18/I/A /19/J/A /20/K/A /21/L/A /22/M/A /23/N/A /24/O/A /25/P/A /26/Q/A /27/R/A /28/S/A /29/T/A /30/U/A /31/V/A /32/W/A /33/X/A /34/Y/A /35/Z/A

your question is not clear, post a before and after example.

I have a string of all numeric characters. The first two characters need to be translated into a single alpha character (e.g. 1023456789 = A23456789 & 20123456789 = K123456789.

The problem is that the PERL script I have set is greedy and is finding any pattern that I have set in the string and is not exclusively only the first two characters (e.g. 1023456789 = AN456789)

The conversion is to substitute the first two numeric characters from 10-35 with A-Z respectively (e.g. 10 = A; 11 = B; 35 = Z)

this is in PHP, you can convert to Perl easily

Code:

<?php

$letters=range('A','Z');
$numbers=range('10','35');
# make a mapping or hash in Perl, 'A'=>10 , 'B'=>11 etc
$map = array_combine($numbers,$letters) ;
$string1 = "1023456789";
$string2 = "20123456789";
echo "String 1 converted: " . $map[substr($string1,0,2)] . substr($string1,2) ."\n";
echo "String 2 converted: " . $map[substr($string2,0,2)] . substr($string2,2) ;
?>

For each line in your file,
split the string into an array
grab the first two array variables - do your math / substitution
merge it back into a string

thanks for the reply.

However, I am restricted to a one line script in the application I am working on. Not sure if this is possible?

How are you calling the script?