I'm borrowing some code originally posted by merlyn. I want to extend it to print additional information on the changed documents, which are served through a template.

To do this, I want to locate variables in the source documents ($pagetitle and $category) and extract the values assigned to those variables. I currently have something like this:

while (<DATAFILE>){
   if ($pt == "") 
      {if (/pagetitle.*?\"(.*?)\"/i){$pt = $1;}}
   if ($pc == "")
      {if (/category.*\?"(.*?)\"/i){$pc = $1;}}
}

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The Cookbook suggests this may be slow and I'd like to consolidate it anyway. It looks like I need a sub that accepts the target variable and the search text as parameters.

A friend recommended qr//. However, I can't seem to get that to work properly. Can someone point me (or post) a good example?

Thanks.

In reply to Optimizing a regex by ZydecoSue

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