I was going to recommend String::Approx, but it turns out that it doesn't yet support regexp patterns. Here's a simple approach to doing it yourself:

  sub mismatches {
    my($source, $target) = @_;
    my @sparts = ($source =~ /(\[.*?\]|.)/g);
    scalar grep substr($target, $_, 1) !~ /^$sparts[$_]/, 0 .. $#spart
+s;
  }

[download]

This assumes source and target are the same length; if you're going to be searching for the closest match within a longer target you'll need a bit more work, and if you need decent performance on very large strings you'll almost certainly want to code it in C/XS.

Hugo

In reply to Re: Mismatch Positions of Ambiguous String by hv
in thread Mismatch Positions of Ambiguous String by monkfan

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