echo5,
It may be advantageous to look at Regexp::Assemble or Regexp::Trie. Note that, thanks to demerphq, in perl 5.10 and beyond the regexp alternation optimization of a trie is built in.

In other words, take the smaller of the two lists and turn it into a single regular expression. This turns your algorithm from O(N * M) to O(N). If this still doesn't make sense, please let me know and I will provide a working example that you can tweak to see if it fits your needs.

Update: The code snippet if (index(lc($data),lc($string)) ge 0) { should likely just be if (index($lc_data, $lc_string) > -1) {. First, you should use > instead of ge when dealing with numerical values (see perlop). Second, repeatedly lowercasing the values is wasted time. Do it once and then compare the copy.

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re: Better way to search array for elements in other array? by Limbic~Region
in thread Better way to search array for elements in other array? by echo5

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.