for loop over records from metadata table { slurp $docid.txt (from pdftotext) into $contents; $s = $title; $s =~ s/\W+/.+?/g; # gaps/punctuation between words -> wildcards if($contents =~ /$s/sig){ print "pos = ", pos $contents, ",$s|"; pos $contents = 0; }else{ print "$textfile didn't contain $s\n"; } }