If you're really checking for $var being eq to one of many elements, a hash would work. 

my %look_for = map { $_ => 1 } qw( a b ... );
if ( $look_for{ $var } ) { }

[download]

That said, I don't see anything wrong with using a regular expression, if it does what you want. I'd only think grep is a problem if you have a huge number of items to check. Maybe you want List::Util::first here?

In reply to Re: long if statements... What's the best way? by kyle
in thread long if statements... What's the best way? by cosmicperl

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