The patterns to match on are simple strings. The being checked will contain the html and txt portions of email messages. There may be multiple matches per scalar being tested. So if I'm testing $scalar for /bob|jan|mike/ $scalar might have any combination of all three and even multiple instances of all three. But, I only need to know about the fist instance of each. Essentially, does $scalar match for each bob jan and mike.
Hope that makes sense. Thank you for the help.