Thanks again, Putting the eval into Method 2 below is (much) slower than any other match (as noted by BrowserUK). Brute force (Method 3) is significantly faster than either 1 or 2, but does not let me loop through an array to check match counts. I have tried "grep -c" within perl and it works, but is not as fast as brute force. Is there a faster way? After 15+ years of Perl I have not needed to worry about cutting edge optimizing (in Perl) ... ergo my ignorance. Thanks for help again. 
my $flush = 0;
my @suits = ( "D", "S", "C", "H" );
my $long_hand = ("2H 3D 4C 5S 5H)";

# Method 1:  43 microseconds
#    (My initial code ... seemed slow ... ergo benchmark)
foreach ( @suits ) {
    @m = ( $long_hand =~ m/$_/g );
    $flush = 1 if  ($#m eq 4 );
}

# Method 2: 126 microseconds (definitely bottleneck)
foreach ( @suits ) {
    my $count = ( eval "\$long_hand =~ tr/$_//" );
    $flush = 1 if  ($count eq 5 );
}

#Method 3: accounts for only 3(!) microseconds of code
# Ugly but functional for very few patterns to check
# BUT what if I had 10k patterns to check
$flush = 1 if ( $long_hand =~ tr/D// eq 5);
$flush = 1 if ( $long_hand =~ tr/S// eq 5);
$flush = 1 if ( $long_hand =~ tr/C// eq 5);
$flush = 1 if ( $long_hand =~ tr/H// eq 5);

[download]

In reply to Re^4: Simple Matching by rnroot
in thread Simple Matching by rnroot

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.