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in reply to Massive regexp search and replace

Can anyone help me find an efficient implementation.

If the cost of a subroutine call is cheaper than scanning the list (which I suspect is the case), then you can assemble all the target patterns into one, perform a single match, and then dispatch to the sub that gives you what you want to substitute:

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w use strict; use Regexp::Assemble; my $ra; my %dispatch = ( 'food' => sub { 'pizza' }, 'water' => sub { 'beer' }, 'like' => sub { 'enjoy' }, '(\d+)F' => sub { int(($ra->mvar(1) - 32 ) * 5/9 ) . 'C' }, ); $ra = Regexp::Assemble->new( track => 1 )->add( keys %dispatch ); while( <DATA> ) { while( $ra->match($_) ) { my $m = $ra->matched; s/$m/&{$dispatch{$m}}/e; } print; } __DATA__ I'd like a glass of water with my food, it's 92F in here!

... produces...

I'd enjoy a glass of beer with my pizza, it's 33C in here!

Generating the dispatch table from a data file is left as an exercise to the reader (but a pretty fun one, I might say).

- another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl