Re: regex alternation

[moritz]

You can try something along these lines to avoid invoking the regex engine:

my $prefix = "in directory '/directory/tmp";
my $prefix_len = length $prefix;
my $test3 = qr<^$prefix(/\..*'|')$>;

for my $line (@test_array) {
   if (substr($line, 0, $prefix_len) eq $prefix
            && $line =~ $test3) {
        print "MATCHED\n";
   }
  else {
        print "NO MATCH\n";
    }
}

But you need to Benchmark it to find out if it's actually faster with your data.