I just want to point out the potential bug that is almost always
lurking around uses of split /\s+/. If there is
leading whitespace in the string, that code will give you a null
leading element in the return list. In the case of arturo's search
routine above, if the search term passed in happens to contain a leading
space (for whatever reason), then the pattern constructed will
look like /|term1|term2|etc/ and will match on any
string (and this bug might be difficult to spot -- even if you print
out the pattern string you might not notice the leading | in the
pattern).
So, the moral is, usually when you want to split on multiple whitespace you'll
want to use the special case of just a string with a single space in
it as the first argument to split(), ie: split " ", $terms;.
(and split() with no arguments is just doing: split(" ",$_)).
A second point about your search subroutine is that you can use the
construct the pattern with the case sensitive switch embedded in the
pattern via (?i). You can also then use the qr// operator so that the
regex does not have to be recompiled for each name passed through the
grep block. So, I'd change that routine to:
sub search {
my $terms = shift;
my $pattern = join "|", split " ", $terms;
my $case = $FORM{case} eq 'insensitive'?"(?i)":"";
$pattern = qr/$case$pattern/;
my @matches = grep { /$pattern/ } @names;
return \@matches;
}
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