And you beat me to whipping up a solution, though plugging your regex into my test proves that your regex works for the test cases I was able to think up:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my @input = ( "cocks are roosters!",
"my cocks crow at dawn",
"i'm a fan of the cocks",
"game cocks all the way!",
"do you like the gamecocks?" );
my $vulgar_list = {
cocks => { regex =>
qr/(?<!a)(?<!the)(?<!game)(?<!\s)\s*coc
+k/ }
};
my $foundvulgar;
for my $input( @input ){
study($input);
foreach my $word (keys %$vulgar_list) {
my $regex = $vulgar_list->{$word}->{regex};
if ($input =~ m/$regex/) {
$foundvulgar = $word;
last;
}
}
print "phrase: $input found?: $foundvulgar\n";
$foundvulgar = '';
}
__OUPUT__
phrase: cocks are roosters! found?: cocks
phrase: my cocks crow at dawn found?: cocks
phrase: i'm a fan of the cocks found?:
phrase: game cocks all the way! found?:
phrase: do you like the gamecocks? found?:
--chargrill
s**lil*; $*=join'',sort split q**; s;.*;grr; &&s+(.(.)).+$2$1+; $; =
qq-$_-;s,.*,ahc,;$,.=chop for split q,,,reverse;print for($,,$;,$*,$/)