Simple Question: How to delete n-th word in a string

How to delete n-th word in a string?

e.g. I'd like to delete 3rd word;

input string:开发者_高级运维 one two three four five;

output string: one two four five;

open (IN, "<$input") or die "Couldn't open input file: $!";
open (OUT, ">$output") or die "Couldn't create input file: $!";
while (my $line = <IN>) {
    # line =~ regexp; Dunno what
    print OUT "$sLine";
}

---

$subject =~ s/^(\s*(?:\S+\s+){2})\S+\s+(.*)$/$1$2/g;

will remove the third word where "word" is the third occurence of contiguous non-space characters.

Explanation:

^         # start of string
(         # Capture the following in backreference $1:
 \s*      # optional whitespace
 (?:      # Match the following group...
  \S+     # one or more non-space characters
  \s+     # one or more whitespace characters
 ){2}     # ... exactly twice.
)         # End of capture $1
\S+\s+    # Match the third word plus following whitespace
(.*)      # Match and capture the rest of the string
$         # until the end

---

print OUT join(' ', splice(split(/ */,$line), 2, 1));

---

Mot as compact as the regex solution but possibly more readable.

sub delete_nth
{
  my $n = shift;
  my $text = shift;

  my @words = split(/ /,$text );
  delete $words[$n-1];

  return join(" ",@words);
}

---

my $x = "one two three four five six seven";

my $nth = 4;
my $i;

$x =~ s/(\b\S+\s*)/ $1 x ( ++$i != $nth ) /eg;

print $x;

The trick here is the use of the repetition operator. "$foo x $boolean" will leave $foo as-is if $boolean is true, and will turn it into an empty string if it's false.

---

In response to the comments by @Ted Hopp I decided to see if I could do this while preserving whitespace. I also made conditional on how to deal with the whitespace before and after the removed word. Yes it is overkill but I am procrastinating on doing something else.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $word_to_remove = 3;
my $remove_leading_space = 0;
my $remove_trailing_space = 1;

while(my $in_string = <DATA>) {
  chomp $in_string;

  my @fields = split(/(\s+)/, $in_string);

  my $field_to_remove = 2*$word_to_remove - 2;  
  #back up the splice position if removing leading space
  $field_to_remove -= ($remove_leading_space) ? 1 : 0;
  #move forward if there are is a leading portion of whitespace
  $field_to_remove += ($fields[0] eq '') ? 2 : 0;

  my $total_to_remove = 
    1 + 
    (($remove_leading_space) ? 1 : 0) + 
    (($remove_trailing_space) ? 1 : 0);

  splice(@fields, $field_to_remove, $total_to_remove);
  my $out_string = join('', @fields);
  print $out_string . "\n";
}

__DATA__
one two four five
one two  four five
  one two   four  five