sim has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hey I am trying to just write first simple perl script. Here what I am trying to do is pass the word which I want to find in array from command line. After that it should print all entries which contain that word. Say I want to find Jacob from command line but its not returning any result. Could u help me out

#! usr/bin/perl

use Fcntl;
print “content-type: text/html \n\n”;

print “Enter word : “;
$word = ;

@myNames = (‘Jacob’, ‘Michael’, ‘Joshua’, ‘Matthew’, ‘Alexander’, ‘And
+rew’);
@grepNames = grep(/$word/, @myNames);

foreach $Names(@grepNames)
{
print $Names;
print “\n”;
}

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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: find words in array
by toolic (Bishop) on Aug 01, 2012 at 18:15 UTC
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Re: find words in array
by thundergnat (Deacon) on Aug 01, 2012 at 18:34 UTC

    Also, be careful of your quoting characters. “ and ” are not the same as " and ". Same thing with ‘ and ’ instead of ' and '. Some "smart editors" may change them automatically. Make sure you are not being sabotaged by your text editor.

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Re: find words in array
by Rudolf (Pilgrim) on Aug 01, 2012 at 18:42 UTC

    Here is an example using pattern matching, if your looking to see if the word is contained within any elements of the array 

    use v5.14;
chomp(my $word = <STDIN>); #get word from command line
                          #chomp removes newline for search
foreach my $name(@array){ #loop through names
   if($name =~ m/$word/i){ #if the word is contained within
      say $name;  # print out the name with a newline (say)
   }
}

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    otherwise, if your looking for exact maches just do something like this. 

    use v5.14;
chomp(my $word = <STDIN>); 
                          
foreach my $name(@array){ 
   if($name eq $word){ #if the name equals the word
      say $name;
   }
}

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Re: find words in array
by Kenosis (Priest) on Aug 01, 2012 at 20:03 UTC

    I think you've done a good job with your first Perl script! The comments above on your coding are excellent.

    As a suggestion, always begin you scripts with the following:

    use strict;
use warnings;

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    I tend to prefer this, instead, which contains the above:

    use Modern::Perl;

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    In either case, these pragmas will catch problematic areas in your script, perhaps saving hours of debugging--among other things.

    This being said, consider the following (which doesn't really do anything more than what's already been done above):

    use Modern::Perl;

my $word = 'a';

my @myNames = qw(Jacob Michael Joshua Matthew Alexander Andrew);

if ( $word ~~ @myNames ) {
    # Using Perl's smart-matching operator
    say qq|Exact match of "$word" found.|;
}
elsif ( my @found = grep /\Q$word\E/i, @myNames ) {
    local $" = "\n"; # Printed between interpolated array's elements
    say qq|Substring/case-insensitive matches for "$word":\n@found|;
}
else {
    say qq|"$word" not found.|;
}

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    Output:

    Substring/case-insensitive matches for "a":
Jacob
Michael
Joshua
Matthew
Alexander
Andrew

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    Actually, the primary difference in the above script is its using Perl's 'smart' operator to check if an element exists in an array.

    Hope this helps!

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