perl replace space with tab

Question

I would like to replace each two spaces from the beginning of each line, with a tab. I tried the following:

s/^(\s{2})+/\t/gm;

it didnt work.

Answer 1

If you're reading the file line by line:

$line =~ s/\G[ ]{2}/\t/g;

If you've slurped the entire file:

$file =~ s/(?:\G|^)[ ]{2}/\t/mg;