Hi. I'm a complete perl novice. I've knocked together some code to do what I want but I know there must be a more efficient way to do this. Can anyone improve on this code? Thanks in advance. Mint 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;


# I want to parse a string containing bug fix identifiers such that
# it will take a list of comma separated bugs, or single bugs prefixed
# with "bug[s:]" ignoring whitespace, sort them and pick out only
# unique identifiers and put them into an array.
# The printing is just for testing each stage.

my $bug_fix_msg =       "this 33,44 is a fix for mybug44,99 real \
                        bug 99 again   bug33r bug1722,3 bUg:99, \
                        bugs:456, 17,   24 bugs 42,58 bug:  50,50";
my @filtered  = ();

while ($bug_fix_msg =~ m/\bbugs?:?([\s\d,]*)\b/ig) {
        push @filtered, $1;
        print $1;
        print "\n";
}
print "filtered: @filtered";

s/\s//g for(@filtered);

my @bug_array = ();

foreach my $bug_line(@filtered) {
        my @items = split(',', $bug_line);
        push @bug_array, @items;
}

my %hash   = map { $_ => 1 } @bug_array;
my @unique = keys %hash;
my @sorted = sort {$a <=> $b} @unique;

print "\nunsorted: @bug_array";
print "\n  unique: @unique";
print "\n  sorted: @sorted\n";

[download]
The output looks like this - 
 99
1722,3
99,

456, 17,   24
 42,58
  50,50
filtered:  99  1722,3  99,
                         456, 17,   24   42,58    50,50
unsorted: 99 1722 3 99 456 17 24 42 58 50 50
  unique: 50 3 58 17 456 42 99 24 1722
  sorted: 3 17 24 42 50 58 99 456 1722

[download]

In reply to Better way to do this, regex etc. by mintz

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