Hello my good Monks. Based on a question in irc.freenode.net/#perl, I created a simple pattern matching routine. It takes patterns with names match tokens between curly brackets, such as {foo}/{bar}-{baz}, and the returns a hash containing the token names as hash keys, and the matched strings as values.

It is fairly trivial, and the code to implement it is quite simple. But before I blow this away, I was curious if there were any CPAN modules to accomplish the same task. I would be surprised if there weren't, but if not, perhaps I should make one? It seems vaguely useful, and might deserve somewhere to live. Any thoughts welcomed.

Here is the code as it currently stands:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

print Dumper({ named_match("{foo} {bar}",   "one two"            ) });
print Dumper({ named_match("{baz} - {qux}", "three - four - five") });

sub named_match {
    my ($pattern, $string) = @_;

    my @names;
    for my $token ($pattern =~ /{([^}]+)}/g) {
        $token = quotemeta $token;
        $pattern =~ s/{$token}/(.*)/;
        push @names, $token;
    }

    my %matches;
    @matches{@names} = $string =~ /$pattern/;

    return %matches;
}
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