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John Dixon
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Using Perl to Convert Hyperlinks and Filenames to Lowercase

Like a lot of web developers, I am not always that disciplined when it comes to the file naming convention I use and sometimes end up with a situation whereby I have some files that are in lowercase, some that begin with a capital letter, and some that are a bit of a mixture.

One web site I maintain contains about 2000 web pages and has about 20,000 hyperlinks. As you can imagine, I had one of those sinking feelings when I was told that in order to migrate the web site to a new content management system, all the file names and hyperlinks would need to be changed to lowercase.

Whenever I am presented with a problem like this, my instinct is always to write a Perl script using a series of regular expressions to solve the problem. This particular situation was no exception.

Change a string to lowercase

The following regular expression changes all the characters in a string to lowercase. The first part of the regular expression finds a hyperlink, and the second part converts the string.

1. $line =~ s/<a href="(.*?)"/<a href="\L$1"/gs;

Although it looks a bit odd, the '(.*?)' matches any string, and the '$1' is the variable containing that string.

See the series of tutorials beginning with Using Perl and Regular Expressions to Process ASCII Files - Part 1 for more information about how to insert the above line into Perl script.

Change a filename to lowercase

Likewise, changing a filename itself is very simple. The following two lines perform the task quite nicely:

1. use File::Copy;
2. move ("$name", "\L$name");

Author: John Dixon
John Dixon Technology Ltd

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