Searching for a specific pattern.

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks!
I working on a code and I have to search for a specific letters code coming from a file, the values I am checking against are: XLX or TLX or XLT or LX.
I am doinf a simple check like this:

my $type="LX";
if( $type=~/LX/)
 {
   do stuff ...
}
[download]

I know that this wouldn't work because all the other letter codes has the "LX" in them, that would fail, correct?
I am doing this way:

my $type="LX"
if( $type=~/\bLX\b/)
 {
   do stuff ...
}
[download]

Is this way the more reliable way to get "LX" by using word boundary or there is a better and more efficient way to do this?
Thanks for the help!

Comment on Searching for a specific pattern. Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Searching for a specific pattern. by phenom (Chaplain) on Jun 18, 2010 at 19:18 UTC
If you're looking for EXACTLY "LX", then just use 'eq': `if( $type eq 'LX' ) {` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Searching for a specific pattern. by Anonymous Monk on Jun 18, 2010 at 19:20 UTC
I can't use that, using XML::XPATH, I need to use regular expression for this.	[reply]
Re^3: Searching for a specific pattern. by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 18, 2010 at 19:50 UTC
I don't see the relation between XPaths and regular expressions, but /^LX\z/ checks for exactly "LX". ( An XPath that checks the value of an attribute would look like `/foo/bar[@type="LX"]` )	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Searching for a specific pattern. by almut (Canon) on Jun 18, 2010 at 19:25 UTC
If you want to avoid that the "LX" etc. will match substrings of words, then yes, using word boundary markers is the way to go.	[reply]

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