If you happen to have a lot of patterns to match, I like the "build a sub on the fly"
approach
my @patterns = qw/ foo bar baz /;
## if you need to return the pattern itself, return '$_' instead
my $match_n_return = join( "\n",
map{ "return \$1 if \$_[0] =~ /$_/o;" } @patterns
);
my $sub = eval qq|sub { $match_n_return return undef }|;
if( $@ ) {
## some syntax error in the eval string
die $@
}
my $matched = $sub->( "string you want to match" );
The only problem here is, you don't get a fine granularity of control for each match.
But I like the fact that this can be used over and over, and that since all the regexes are
pre-compiled, you save some time for repeated use