in reply to build regexp on a list of patterns

The regexen we might build for that are neither unique nor equivalent to each other. If you want a regex that only matches something literal in the list,

my $re = do { local $" = '|'; qr/^@{[map {quotemeta} @list]}$/; };
Automatically generated regexes are often inefficient or unwieldy in the interest of simpler generating code. Would you take qr/^[11111][22333][33333][44444][12312]$/ as a solution?
my @sets; for (@list) { my $str = $_; for (0..(length-1)) { $sets[$_] .= substr $str, $_, 1; } } my $re = qr/^${\join '', map {"[$_]"} @sets}$/;
This is a pretty open-ended problem. You should look carefully at what you expect from your data and what kind of solution you want.

Update: If the real problem is to construct an efficient test of whether a string is in @list, use a hash:

{ my %test_hash; @test_hash{@list} = (); sub efficient_test { exists $test_hash{+shift}; } }

After Compline,
Zaxo

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Re^2: build regexp on a list of patterns
by ysth (Canon) on Apr 06, 2005 at 09:08 UTC
    my $re = do { local $" = '|'; qr/^@{[map {quotemeta} @list]}$/; };
    In this case, it would appear that they are all the same length, but in general, the list should be sorted longest-first, so that @list=qw/foo bar foobar/ will ever match foobar.