know perl for gnus-user-format-function-X but not lisp

[Dan Jacobson]

Is there any perl to emacs lisp converter program?

You see I want do s/A/B/g in emacs lisp, but it looks tough in the docs,

   What you probably want is a loop like this:
     (while (search-forward FROM-STRING nil t)
       (replace-match TO-STRING nil t))
   which will run faster and will not set the mark or print anything.
   (You may need a more complex loop if FROM-STRING can match the null string
   and TO-STRING is also null.)

Checking in the Emacs Lisp manual didn't make things clearer.

You see I want to do as I say in the comment:
(setq
 gnus-summary-line-format
 (concat
  "%U%R%z%I%(%t|%~(cut-left 3)d%~(max-right 2)d%4L|%-20,20f%)"
  "%~(max-right 1)~(form(gnus-extra-header 'X-NOFFLE-Status))@:%s\n"))
 ;I want to use (perl) regexp s/(\w)\w* */$1/g above to get the first
 ;letter of each of the items on the X-NOFFLE-Status line, but don't know
 ;how in gnus, so we just get the first letter.

There is no example on gnus Info node 8.4.4 User-Defined Specs.