[plug] Perl Question: Searching an array

[Matthew Robinson]

David Buddrige wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have a perl program that contains a very large array.  I want to 
> search this array to determine if it contains a particular value.  Is 
> there a faster way to search the array than this?
> 
> $search_val = "text-to-look-for";
> $found = "false";
> foreach $line ( @myarray )
> {
>   if ( $search_val == $line )
>   {
>       $found = "true";
>   }
> }
> I've beeen reading through "Learning Perl" but can't find any answer on 
> this one. 8-)
> 

You probably want to use the perl grep function.  You can get 
information about the grep function using perldoc as follows:

perldoc -f grep

This could be used (to duplicate your existing functionality) as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my @myarray = ('foo', 'bar');
my $search_val = 'text_to_find';

my $found = 'false';
$found = 'true' if grep /$search_val/, @myarray;

print $found, "\n";

__END__


Hope this helps,


Matt

-- 
print map{s&^(.)&\U\1&&&$_}split$,=$",(`$^Xdoc$,-qj`=~m&"(.*)"&)[0].$/