You could capture the match (read perldoc perlre on capturing brackets) and use the capture result to determine your program flow. One elegant way of doing this is to use a hash with the possible matches as hash keys, and the corresponding actions as the hash values in a subroutine reference (this is commonly called a "dispatch table"):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use Carp;

my $input = shift or croak "Give me an argument, fool!\n";
my %action = (
              foo => sub { print "fooing\n" },
              bar => sub { print "barred\n" },
              baz => sub { print "all bazzed out\n" },
              );

if (my ($match) = $input =~ m/(foo|bar|baz)/ ){
    &{$action{$match}};
} else {
    croak "Dunno what to do\n";
}

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There are ten types of people: those that understand binary and those that don't.

In reply to Re: Finding out which of a list of patterns matched by tirwhan
in thread Finding out which of a list of patterns matched by lemnisca

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