I think this is what you are after although I may be misreading your post. If I understand correctly, you search for your phases in a certain order and you want to find the first occurence of each phrase ignoring any phrases that are out of sequence, e.g. a "phrase2" that is before the first "phrase1" is ignored.

To do this I read the lines into an array. If your file is very large this might not be feasible. The adjustment to $lineNo is because arrays are zero-based and I'm assuming you number your lines from 1.

use strict;
use warnings;

use List::Util q{first};
use Data::Dumper;

open my $inFH, q{<}, \ <<EOD or die qq{open: $!\n};
 1:gash line
 2:phrase4
 3:akjdakj
 4:fwefkwe
 5:phrase5
 6:phrase1
 7:adsfwfw
 8:phrase3
 9:phrase5
10:jkjd wsekjw wiu
11:phrase2
12:wewefwefwf
13:another line
14:dsjwjk
15:adsfwfw
16:phrase3
17:another line
18:adsfwfw
19:phrase5
20:phrase6
21:ertgerher
EOD

my @lines = <$inFH>;
close $inFH or die qq{close: $!\n};

my @phrases = map { qq{phrase$_} } 1 .. 6;
my $cumulativeOffset = 0;
foreach my $phrase ( @phrases )
{
    my $rxPhrase = qr{$phrase};
    my $lineNo =
      first { $lines[ $_ ] =~ $rxPhrase } 0 .. $#lines;

    unless ( defined $lineNo )
    {
        print qq{$phrase: not found in sequence\n};
        next;
    }

    $lineNo ++;
    $cumulativeOffset += $lineNo;

    print qq{$phrase: $cumulativeOffset\n};
    splice @lines, 0, $lineNo;
}

[download]

The output.

phrase1: 6
phrase2: 11
phrase3: 16
phrase4: not found in sequence
phrase5: 19
phrase6: 20

[download]

I hope I have guessed right and this is of use.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re: search pattern and arrays by johngg
in thread search pattern and arrays by mercuryshipz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.