How do I use Perl and Regular Expressions to convert a SQL document to ColdFusion script?

Question

I need to convert a document of SQL statements to a ColdFusion document. I only have a little experience with Regular Expressions and I am Perl super-newb (I just taught myself

Answer 1

From perlvar.html docs:
$/ The input record separator, newline by default. This influences Perl's idea of what a "line" is. Works like awk's RS variable, including treating empty lines as a terminator if set to the null string. (An empty line cannot contain any spaces or tabs.)

If you use $/, it should always be local.
I personally would do it like this:

my $file = join '', <DATA>
$file =~ s/.../.../eg;

But you can do it like below, but you must include the /g modifier.
Look at the >>> chunks Perl is grabbing. When $/ is set to '', it uses a blank line as a record separator.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $num = 0;

{
   local $/ = '';
   while (<DATA>)
   {
      print ">>> '$_'\n\n";
      s/(INSERT[\s\S]*?;|DELETE[\s\S]*?;|UPDATE[\s\S]*?;|SELECT[\s\S]*?;)/'<!--- SQL Number: ' . ++$num . ' ' . '<p> ' . $1 . "<\/p> --->\n"/eg;
      print;
   }
}

__END__

Answer 2

You can take advantage of the fact that the individual sql statements in your input file are terminated by a semi-colon character. Set the record input separator to a semi-colon $/ = ';'in your perl script and then it will read one complete sql statement on each read of STDIN, regardless how many actual lines it spans.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

use strict;

$/ = ';';

my $num = 0;
while (my $sql = <>) {
  $sql =~ s/^\s+//;
  printf "<!--- SQL Number: " . ++$num . " <p>$sql</p> --->\n" if $sql;
}

Answer 3

Once you have a ; with in the statement you are going to hurt. Use a dedicated tool like SQL::SplitStatement, this works precise.