CODEWITHSUNDEEP
perlvariables
Cecily
Cecily

Reputation: 61

Test whether one string contains any of the words in another

I have a Perl program code that pulls a description string from a hash.

I have my variable $ui equal to the variable $uniqueID, but what I want is to return true if $ui contains any words in variable $unqiueID. But =~ isn't working.

Is there a smart way of doing this?

sub getDescription {

    my $uniqueID = shift;
    my $retval;
    my $ui;

    foreach my $key ( keys %HASHLIST ) {

        foreach $ui ( @{ $HASHLIST{$key}->{uniqueID} }) {

            if ( $ui eq $uniqueID ) {
                $retval = $HASHLIST{$key}->{description};
                last;
            }
         }

         last if $retval;
    }

    return $retval;
}

Upvotes: 0

Views: 67

Answers (2)

Borodin
Borodin

Reputation: 126722

Your purpose isn't clear, but it sounds like $uniqueID is a list of words, and you want the first entry in %HASHLIST whose uniqueID matches any one of those words

This will do that for you, but I must say that your data structure isn't ideally suited to this job

sub getDescription {

    my ($uniqueID) = @_;
    my %wanted = map { $_ => 1 } split ' ', $uniqueID;

    for my $ui ( values %HASHLIST ) {
        my @ids = @{ $item->{uniqueID} };
        return $item->{description} if @wanted{@ids};
    }

    return $retval;
}

Upvotes: 0

Mikesname
Mikesname

Reputation: 8901

A simple way to test if one scalar variable contains another is:

if ($ui =~ /$uniqueID/) {
    ...
}

(And as @Markus Laire points out you can also use /\b$uniqueID\b/ to prevent partial word matches.)

Upvotes: 2

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