I'm trying to write a regex function that will identify and replace a single instance of a match within a string without affecting the other instances. For example, I have this string:
12||34||56
I want to replace the second set of pipes with ampersands to get this string:
12||34&&56
The regex function needs to be able to handle x amount of pipes and allow me to replace the nth set of pipes, so I could use the same function to make these replacements:
23||45||45||56||67 -> 23&&45||45||56||67
23||34||98||87 -> 23||34||98&&87
I know that I could just split/replace/concat the string at the pipes, and I also know that I can match on /\|\|/ and iterate through the resulting array, but I'm interested to know if it's possible to write a single expression that can do this. Note that this would be for Javascript, so it's possible to generate a regex at runtime using eval(), but it's not possible to use any Perl-specific regex instructions.