Are you sure that the match part won't work? Have you checked that you can open your file and read the lines you expect?

Adding the line

use strict;
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to the top of your script will make Perl tell you what it sees. Then you will find that what you see is not what Perl sees.

You should always guard your calls to open with an or die like this:

open my $file, $filename
    or die "Couldn't open '$filename': $!";
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That way, you prevent your program from running when it can't read a file and you even get an informative error message.

Hi Corion and everyone

thanks in advance for your answer. The problem is not that it can't read the file. The lines i posted above where just there for shorten the problem. I usually put the "use strict" pragma and the die() instruction in my scripts to prevent what you correctly pointed out.

This time, indeed, the problem is that if I try to match the array's elements without cycling them with a foreach, I can't get a match.

I'll try to post a maybe better example

#!/usr/bin/perl

my @array = qw( ciccio paperino palla gigio pluto );

my $test = pluto;

if ( $test =~ $array[0..$#array] ) {

        print "It matched!\n";

}
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didn't work for me. Is the syntax wrong? Am I missing something? Thanks again for your help.

Am I missing something?

Yes, you are ignoring important warnings because you did not use strict and warnings.

One way to search an array for a specific value is to use grep. I think you are looking for something like this:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @array = qw( ciccio paperino palla gigio pluto );
my $test = 'pluto';
if (grep { $test eq $_ } @array ) {
        print "It matched!\n";
}
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You are making up Perl syntax and expect it to work. I don't think that array slices and the =~ operator are documented to do anything sensible.

Again, you are not using strict. You should really get into the habit of doing that.

If you are using Perl 5.10 or newer, you might be able to put the "smart match" operator (~~) to work. See perlop on it. Otherwise, you could use grep to search through the array.

I've used the following technique successfully for this kind of situation. It compiles the regex only once, so it can be reused efficiently in a loop:

my @array = qw( ciccio paperino palla gigio pluto );
my $TestReStr = join("|", map { "(${_})" } @array);
my $TestRe = qr/$TestReStr/;
my $test = 'pluto';
print "It matched!\n" if $test =~ $TestRe ;
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if you tested negative for corion's explanation which is usually the case(people usually tend to open a file that does not exists), try this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my @array = qw(q e t u o);


while(<DATA>){
  chomp(my $r = $_);
  grep{print "$_\n" if ($r =~ /$_/g)}@array;
}


__DATA__
ff 
qksjnfji klksnsd
jkksdjen rjkaa
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cheers

grep{print "$_\n" if ($r =~ /$_/g)}@array;

• There is no need for the //g modifier.
• I would not advocate this usage of grep. You are ignoring its return value. I think a for loop would be more straightforward in this case:

  for (@array) {
    print "$_\n" if ($r =~ /$_/);
  }
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Thanks baxy77bax for your suggestions.

I applied it in the shape that you and toolic suggested, and it worked!

Thanks again for your precious help!