I wish it were that simple! What I have are dept code *prefixes* which are not necessarily all the same length. For example, if our department codes were like:
ABCD123456 DEFG123456 DEFG998800 DEEE11223344
The code prefixes I have are like:
ABCD12 DEF DEEE11223
In other words, they can be any length. I tried using something like this:
foreach my $pattern (@patterns) {
if (substr($fields[7],0,length($pattern)) eq $pattern) {
### Code here
last;
}
}
but that was slightly slower than the regex methods.
| [reply]
[d/l] |
Ouch.
How many prefixes of each length, though?
If you have many of a given length, maybe you could do something like this (writing support code to generate this HOH, of course):
my %prefixList=(
3 => {DEF=>1, SRC=>1},
6 => {ABCD12=>1},
10 => {DEEEE11223},
);
#....
# inside the loop
foreach my $length(%prefixList) {
if($prefixList{$length}->{substr($fields[7],0,$length)}){
### code here
last;
}
}
If the set of sizes isn't dynamic, you could make that an AOH, with some possibly empty hashes, I guess... You could also get rid of the loop and inline the check for each length, but I don't think that would save you much.
If you're only ever going to have 1 or 2 prefixes of a given length, then this isn't worth it. But given your initial description, I think with a LOT of prefixes and very few different lengths, this could start to pull ahead of the regex.
--
Mike | [reply]
[d/l] |