January Programming Competition

Question

January Programming Competition
The goal of this months programming competition is to create a simple utility for reformatting one string given a second formatting string. Each person may create a custom syntax for the formatting string or simply duplicate an already existing one. Please use a logical formatting syntax and nothing too cryptic. For example "tar.gz|tgz" could be an example formatting string that would replace all instances of "tar.gz" with "tgz" in the source string.
The following are requirements for each difficulty level. You may expand your program beyond the scope of these guidelines but your program must do at least the following:
Novice - You must create a simple utility that can match and replace characters in a source string with characters from a formatting string. You do not have to worry about case. This is the basic requirement and may be met using any programming method of the users choice. Your program may not simply call a prexisting program. It must do the work internally. Have fun!
Intermediate - Your program must be able to do everything in novice category and also provide an option (maybe a command line switch) to make the process case sensitive. Note that you should be able to do both a case sensitive and unsensitive operation. Also, you must provide a means of setting the range the formatting operation, instead of always operating on the entire string.
Advanced - You must complete all the above with the addition of processing of pre-defined fields. For example, "001|%d" could mean to replace "001" with the current date. This is a simplistic example, but you get the point. You may create as many of these fields as you wish and these don't have to be limited to static information just the date. Something like a counter (numeric or alphanumeric) would be nice too.
Remember, these are basic requirements. You should probably make a better program than I've outlined here. Also, language is not a factor here and zsh/bash style scripts meet the requirements.
Due Date: Sat, January 28
Programming Competition Guidelines

Answer 1

phrakture wrote:
LB06 wrote:One question: if it is not allowed to write a wrapper around sed, what is allowed? I mean, if you do a perl/python implementation you're basically writing a wrapper around s/// or sub(), right?
I think the point is that sed easilly supports the intermediate and advanced portions... yes the novice stuff is very short, code wise, but for a novice it brings to light some very important techniques.  I think the true point of this is when you start adding "%foo" fields and case (in)sensitivity stuff.
True. Being a perl-novice, I figured that this was the perfect opportunity to make myself a bit familiar with Perl. The actual replace part is no longer than 5 lines, but I've already learned a lot about pipes and command line args.
Btw, I like this assignment. I was just asking if the script that I was working on would be valid, but on second thought it doesn't really matter to me .