Replacing substrings in a string

[David Given <dg@...>]

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One thing I find myself needing to do suprisingly frequently is to replace all
occurances of a particular substring with a different substring, in a larger
string.

Aha, you cry. string.gsub() is exactly what I'm looking for... except it's
not, because I can't turn off regular expression processing, and my pattern is
algorithmically generated and might contain '%' characters.

What's the best way around this? What I'd *like* is for a 'plain' parameter to
be added to string.gsub(), but of course that's unlikely to happen. So far
I've been using a fairly naive approach --- repeatedly calling string.find,
constructing a list of fragments, and then concatenating them with
table.concat. It's a bit verbose and quite irritating, and I'm not convinced
about the speed. Are there any more cunning ways of doing this?

- --
+- David Given --McQ-+ "If you're up against someone more intelligent
|  dg@cowlark.com    | than you are, do something insane and let him think
| (dg@tao-group.com) | himself to death." --- Pyanfar Chanur
+- www.cowlark.com --+

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