May I suggest that you learn to use the foreach loop in Perl, rather than the c-style for loop. 
my @searchTexts = split (/and|or/i,$query);
foreach my $text (@searchtexts) {
   $text =~ s/^\s+//;
   $text =~ s/\s+$//;
   print "$text\n";
}

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and in a loop this simple I would just use $_ 
foreach (split /and|or/i,$query) {
  s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/$1/;
  print "$_\n";
}

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or reduce it even further with a map and a join (depends on circumstance, if I'm the not only maintainer I'd probably use the above version) 
print join("\n",map {/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/;$1} split(/and|or/i,$query)) . "\
+n";

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all the above code is untested.

update: also you could first clean the ends of $query (with s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/). Then if you change the slip condition to /\s*(?:and|or)\s*/ you can skip the map: 
print join("n\",split(/\s*(?:and|or)\s*/,$query)) . "\n";

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of course at this point you can skip the whole split and use: 
$query =~ s/\s*(?:and|or)\s*/\n/g;
print "$query\n";

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A final note, all these will fail horribly if your data has and/or imbedded in words. ie world. You probably want to split on /\s+(?:and|or)\s+/ or /\s*\b(?:and|or)\b\s*/

Phew, now I need a nap


-pete
"Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere."

In reply to Re: Huge simple problem by dreadpiratepeter
in thread Huge simple problem by Anonymous Monk

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