G'day yoda54,

Try to match shorter patterns before longer ones. While your example only shows single items for your positive and negative criteria, your code suggests multiple items are possible. You haven't indicated the source of the criteria but, if qw{book and lots of other patterns then b} was valid positive criteria, you'd fail to match "book" in any of the $data items only to later successfully match "b" in all of them. 

... join '|' => sort { length $a <=> length $b } @$xxxxxx_criteria;

[download]

You've shown interpolating double quotes in many places where you don't actually want to interpolate anything. They may not be an issue in your minimal example; however, consider what happens if you're searching for, say, email addresses: 

... "whoever@example.com" ... # Oops!

[download]

If the items in your criteria lists are mutually exclusive, consider wrapping your alternations in (?> ... ) to avoid backtracking. See perlre - Extended Patterns and perlre - Backtracking.

-- Ken

In reply to Re: General Advice by kcott
in thread General Advice by yoda54

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.