venky4289:

What part are you having difficulty with?

If you haven't started at all, I'd suggest converting the words with underscores in them into regular expressions, and then searching through your dictionary.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

I have stored all the dictionary words into an array. . And all the words i need to search into another array. .. For example @array1=("fil_" , "t_xt"); words need to be filled @array2=("file","text","fils") words in dictionary file Now i need to match the elements of array1 with array2 and i should get the output as fil_ : file,fils T_xt : text Thanks for ur replies

Yes, that helped! Here's one option that substitutes the "_" with ".+" for use in a regex (use "." if you want only one letter to match):

use strict;
use warnings;

my @array1 = qw (fil_  t_xt _erl);
my @array2 = qw (Merlin file text fils perl filled);

for my $stem (@array1) {
    my $re = $stem;
    $re =~ s/_/.+/;
    /\b$re\b/ and print "$stem: $_\n" for @array2;
}
[download]

Output:

fil_: file
fil_: fils
fil_: filled
t_xt: text
_erl: perl
[download]

Only whole words are matched, as word boundires (\b) are used in the regex which, if omitted, will also match substrings within the dictionary words.

Hope this helps!

Update: Below is an updated version which adapts BrowserUk's preferred solution:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @array1 = qw (fil_  t_xt _erl);
my @array2 = qw (Merlin file text fils perl filled);

my $words = join ' ', @array2;

for my $stem (@array1) {
    my $re = $stem;
    $re =~ s/_/./;
    print "$stem: $1\n" while $words =~ /\b($re)\b/g;
}
[download]

Output:

fil_: file
fil_: fils
t_xt: text
_erl: perl
[download]

If you want the "_" to be matched by more than one letter in the dictionary words, change the substitution to $re =~ s/_/\\S+/;.

• How are the words stored in the dictionary file? Any data samples you can share?
• How do the "_" 'words' occur in the other file(s)?
• How do you expect to "... find the exact word which matches ..." if, e.g., multiple words in the dictionary file begin with "fil"?
• What have you tried? Do you have any code samples you can share?