I still like my method below better <snip>

I don't. The OP specifically states "I'll potentially have quite a lot of patterns to test". What if "quite a lot" means, say, 50, or 500, or 5,000? Your dispatch table could become unmanageably long...

In reply to Re^3: Finding out which of a list of patterns matched by Not_a_Number
in thread Finding out which of a list of patterns matched by lemnisca

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