in reply to Best approach to creating a regex from a filehandle

Re interpreting " is there a better way ..."

If all you are checking for is absence of a word in a black list, i'd suggest putting the black-listed words into a hash, and simply checking : 

   if ( exists $Black_List{$candidate_word} ){
     # complain, bail, or whatever ...
   }

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You could upper/lower case the candidate word to maintain canonality.

        What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?
              -Larry Wall, 1992

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom