Greetings all,

I have an array called @material that contains a text file. I've also got an array called @key_phrases where each element is a string with two words in it, seperated by a space. Each element represents a two-word phrase in the text file that exists only once, thereby making it "key."

What I want to do is find the most efficient way, without loosing the structure of @material, of finding and "marking" each key words pair with HTML bold tagging. What I've come up with works, but it's painfully slow.

my $phrase;
foreach $phrase (@key_phrases) {
     my($worda,$wordb) = split(/ /, $phrase);
     foreach (@material) {
          last if
          (s|([\W\b])($worda)(\W+)($wordb)([\W\b])|
               $1<B>$2</B>$3<B>$4</B>$5|i);
     }
}

# Here's where I clean up redundant tags...
foreach (@material) {
     s|<B><B>|<B>|g;
     s|</B></B>|</B>|g;
     s|</B> <B>| |g;
}

[download]

Any suggestions on how to get this to run faster? It annoys me that I have to loop through @material each time I need to find a @key_phrases element. By definition, the key phrase will only happen once in @material, so I could do some kind of grep as long as I can put the altered element back into @material in the right order.

Oh, one other thing, I'm running this on a Win32 box (not by choice), so I'm somewhat restricted in what UNIX command-line features I can use.

Thanks in advance. :)

-Gryphon.

In reply to foreach (@array) s/x/y/ efficiency by gryphon

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