If all you're trying to do is replace a series of words, some of which are substrings of other words in the series, there is a simpler way--

You could simply have your replacing regexp do all of the replacing at once. Regexp 'or' matches try to match the leftmost string first, so you could simply combine your two lists as such:

@array = ( "foo bar", "bar foo" );
@array2 = ( "foo", "bar" );
$string = "there is a foo bar and a bar foo and also foo and bar.";

print "string before - $string\n";

$swapString = join ("|", @array, @array2);
print "swapString 1 - $swapString\n";
$string =~ s/($swapString)/<B>$1<\/B>/gi;

print "string after first - $string\n";
[download]

Which prints out:

string before - there is a foo bar and a bar foo and also foo and bar.
swapString 1 - foo bar|bar foo|foo|bar
string after first - there is a <B>foo bar</B> and a <B>bar foo</B> an
+d also <B>foo</B> and <B>bar</B>.
[download]

To generalize this, you might want to use:

$swapString = join ("|", sort { length($b) <=> length($a) } @array, @a
+rray2);
[download]

which will ensure that your lists will replace the longest matches before the shortest.

If there's some other reason for needing to do this in two passes, disregard this solution.

stephen

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