How do I add HTML breaks before a literal list bullet • with regular expressions?

I have an odd situation in pulling info from a database to display a webpage.

The administrator copies and pastes info into a mediumtext latin1_swedish_ci field (the description column).

There are • bullets in the data, not <li>.

I am already doing a little formatting before displaying in Perl with:

my $string = $Description;
my @sentences = split(/(?:(?<=\.|\!|\?)(?<!Mr\.|Dr\.)(?<!U\.S\.A\.)\s+(?=[A-Z]))/, $string);

for (@sentences) {
#TRIED THIS $_ =~ s/•/<br />•/g;
print qq~ $_ <br /><br />~;
}

Which works pretty well making new lines after pe开发者_如何转开发riods. No complaints, yet.

However, the "bulleted" lists are all run together like List•foo•bar•nonewline.

Obviously, I would like:

List

•foo

•bar

•nonewline

Is this possible? Does the old "garbage in, garbage out" rule kill this one?

I would just like to start a newline before the bullets. There is no HTML in the field and I have no control over that aspect. I can only control how it is displayed in the webpage in which HTML is obviously at my disposal.

Would HTML::FormatText be of any assistance here?

I appreciate verbose examples as I am very new to this. Thinking ahead, what if she pasted in different bullet types at times?

---

s/•/<br />•/g

Did you take a close look at the error message you got when you tried that? If you're using a slash as the delimiter in s///, then any slashes in the pattern or replacement will need to be escaped.

s/•/<br \/>•/g

But to make it more readable, use different delimiters.

s|•|<br />•|g