Shell Programming and Scripting

anyone know if there is a way to use an array in a regular expression. suppose i want to find out if $sometext contains one of an array's elements. Obviously the code below doesn't work, but is there something similar that does work?

@array = qw/thing1 thing2 thing3/;

if ($sometext =~ /(@array)/) {
print "$1\n";
}


basically i've got a big list of words to search for, and i'd like to avoid something like this:

($sometext =~ /(thing1|thing2|thing3)/)

well your not really useing the array as the regx your useing a regex to find 1 element in your array.

you would end up doing it so the regex loops over the each element in an array.

check out perls map and grep functions.

here is a quick example.
my @nfiles=grep /my search pattern/, @files;

if you use the array @nfiles as your collection the values pulled from @files will populate the @nfiles.

if you use @nfiles as a scallar ie: $nfiles you will get the number of times you found a match vs. each match.

same things w/ map. except the map function can have a function to process your inbound data.


EDIT:

ok i think i know what your trying to do now.

and the answer is still yes.

populate your array then do a loop to itterate over each element of your array inserting it as the search pattern

something like

[code]
for (@words) {
if ( $sometext =~ /$_/ ) { print "I FOUND IT BOB: $_\n" );
}

excellent, the solution in your edit works great

thanks OP

you were already on the money i was supprised you didnt see it as you were typeing it out.