http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=391451


in reply to Matching against list of patterns

There are a couple of ways to discover what pattern matched. The easiest is probably to use backrefs:

my $pattern = join '|', map "($_)", @patterns; ... if ($line =~ /$pattern/i) { my $matchref = $#-; print "matched $pattern[$matchref - 1]\n"; }

As warned by other posters, you may need to play with the ordering to ensure that the preferred pattern matches if more than one can, in which case you will also need a way to get back from the index of the matched backreference to the actual pattern.

Hugo