CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexperlfiltering
ssllyy
ssllyy

Reputation: 1

Filter strings on word/phrase : Perl

I am new at perl and I am looking for some assistance on basically filtering a list of keywords. In short this is to a hash of strings against the same hash of words/phrases. This is to get the lowest common denominator and clean the list up.

For example say the list included the following:

bat
bat boy
bat-boy
bat&boy
bat:boy
bat's
bat-boy's
batman & bat boy

It should only match to the following:

bat boy            (because of bat)
batman & bat boy   (because of bat)

Regex is obviously the way to go, but I am stuck with the following as I can't use /b (word boundary match) as some of the words contain non word characters -,', &,:, etc.

What would be the best way to write the regex? I am checking $keyx against $keyz

Here is the regex:

if $keyx=~m/\Q$keyz\E/

Any help would be appreciated

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1593

Answers (1)

TLP
TLP

Reputation: 67900

Not quite sure what you're after, but I am guessing you want to match whole words only, no partials, and no words connected with non-letters. A way to accomplish this is to use negative look-around assertions:

use strict;
use warnings;
use v5.10;

for (split /, */, <DATA>) {
    say if /(?<![^ ])bat(?![^ ])/;
}

__DATA__
bat, bat boy, bat-boy, bat&boy, bat:boy, bat's, bat-boy's, batman & bat boy

Output:

bat
bat boy
batman & bat boy

So we assert that the characters surrounding the key word is not not space.

Upvotes: 1

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