I have a regex situation where I'm looking for a "phrase match" contained in incoming data. In other words, if someone fills out and submits a textarea form field, and the content of the text submitted matches a particular phrase (or single word), a flag is set.

I've done the deed with this approach
(the string below is abbreviated significantly): 
my $phrase = 'phrase one|phrase two|a different phrase|yet another mat
+ch|one more to match|single|word|matches';

if ($incoming{'text'} =~ /$phrase/) {
    DO WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE HERE
}

[download]
But as the list of phrases increases, the approach above is:
- starting to look ugly
- becoming tedious to maintain
- and maybe getting inneficient?

I'm thinking that this is an event that many have had to deal with, and that there are elegent ways to handle this situation (ways which I'm not aware of). I tried a search, but given the ambiguity of any search terms, wasn't able to hit on an answer.

Suggestions/solutions appreciated.

In reply to Matching a long list of phrases by Hagbone

Title:
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