Dear Monks,

I am stuck at a matching problem. I have an array which contains a list of terms and their translations, and I want to check if a word is contained in a string of text. I loop my array, and if a match is found I print out the translation. This is an example of my array:

my @dic= (
 ['animal source food','aliment d’origine animale'],
 ['balanced diet','régime alimentaire équilibré'],
 ['food','aliment'],
 ['nutrition','nutrition'],
 ['nutrition assessment','évaluation de l’état nutritionnel']
);

[download]

I perform my matching with the following basic script (being $string my string of text:

foreach my $row (@glossary){
    my $TermDBSource=@$row[0];
    my $TermDBTarget=@$row[1];
            
    if ($string=~ /$TermDBSource/){
        print "$TermDBTarget\n";
                last;
    }
}

[download]

So far so good. My requirement is to match the longest n-gram. As I use a loop, the first match found in my array will be displayed. This could be a problem in a case where $string='this is a nutrition assessment' as it will match first 'nutrition' and not 'nutrition assessment' as desired. If I take out last it will match both 'nutrition' and 'nutrition assessment', again no good. The only idea I came up with is to order my array alphabetically (easy to do) and by length of n-gram (need to look at how to solve it, but I found https://perlmonks.com/?node_id=1219394 which may help me).

My question is more on the approach. Do you think this is the right approach, or I am complicated things too much and there are other more straightforward methods to achieve my goal?

In reply to Matching wirth ordered array by Anonymous Monk

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