Hello monks, the program I'm working on attempts to accomplish two things: 1: break a sentence (user inputed) into its elements (words or whatever seperated by a space character). 2: test those elements against a file of nouns to see if they match. if the first element in the sentence is a match, the program works the way I want it to (ex: Cars bla bla.) Cars will match, however if the element is not the first one (ex: I like Cars.), Cars will not match with Cars in the txt file. any help or tips/hints would be much appreciated thank you!

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $sen = <STDIN>; chomp $sen;

if($sen =~ s/(\.|\?|\!)$/ /g){ #get punctuation and replace with white
+space
  $punctuation = $&;
}

while($sen =~ m/ /g){ # test for spaces in sentence
  my $pos = pos $sen;
  my $element = substr($sen,0,$pos,""); # get chunk of sentence
  chop $element; #remove end whitespace
  
  push(@senElements,$element); #push chunk into array
}

open(NOUNS,'<',"nouns.txt") or die "Can't open noun database: $!\n";

# # # attempt to recognize sentence elements as a noun via file nouns.
+txt # # #
foreach $element (@senElements){
  while(<NOUNS>){
    chomp(my $line = $_);
    $line =~ s/ |\n//g; #remove any space chars and newlines from file
+ line
    
    if($element =~ m/^($line)$/i){
      print "\n!MATCH! ~ $element is a noun\n";
    }
  }
}

close(NOUNS);

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In reply to testing parts of a string against a word database by Rudolf

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