How to find strings that contain a substring from a given list - perl

Question

I have a string that may or may not contain some specific words.
IF it contain the one of the works I want to print the string in a different color (depending on the word)
So I was thinking to have an array containing the list of the words (e.g. one for red word one for yellow and one for green as the example below:
push(#red_word, [ "error","ERROR","Assertion","assertion","Error","ASSERTION","Errors" ]);
push(#yellow_word, [ "WARNING","Warning","warning","PAUSED","Paused","paused","Warnings" ]);
push(#green_word, [ "ACTIVE","Active","active" ]);
$l is the string i want to check, I tried something like this
foreach my $l (#$lines) {
if ($l =~ #red_word) {
print '<FONT COLOR="FF0000">'.$l.'</FONT><br>';
}
else {
if ($l =~ #yellow_word) {
print '<FONT COLOR="FFFF00">'.$l.'</FONT><br>';
}
else {
if ($l =~ #green_word) {
print '<FONT COLOR="008000">'.$l.'</FONT><br>';
}
else {
print '<FONT COLOR="000000">'.$l.'</FONT><br>';
}
}
}
}
but the result is erratic, some lines are printed in red without any relation to the list red_word.
what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

This isn't doing what you think it's doing:
push(#red_word, [ "error","ERROR","Assertion","assertion","Error","ASSERTION","Errors" ]);
push(#yellow_word, [ "WARNING","Warning","warning","PAUSED","Paused","paused","Warnings" ]);
push(#green_word, [ "ACTIVE","Active","active" ]);
You're creating a two dimensional data structure a single element array, containing a nested array.
$VAR1 = [
[
'error',
'ERROR',
'Assertion',
'assertion',
'Error',
'ASSERTION',
'Errors'
]
];
That match isn't going to work very well as a result. I'm not actually sure what it'll be doing, but it won't be testing 'if the word is in the list'.
Try instead building a regular expression from your array:
my #red_words = (
"error", "ERROR", "Assertion", "assertion",
"Error", "ASSERTION", "Errors"
);
my $is_red = join( "|", map {quotemeta} #red_words );
$is_red = qr/($is_red)/;
print "Red" if $line =~ m/$is_red/;
Perhaps something like this:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my %colour_map = (
'error' => 'FF0000',
'errors' => 'FF0000',
'assertion' => 'FF0000',
'warning' => 'FFFF00',
'warnings' => 'FFFF00',
'paused' => 'FFFF00',
'active' => '008000',
);
my $search = join( "|", map {quotemeta} keys %colour_map );
$search = qr/\b($search)\b/;
my #lines = (
"line containing assertion",
"a warning",
"green for active",
"A line containing ACTIVE"
);
foreach my $line (#lines) {
if ( my ($word) = $line =~ m/$search/ ) {
print "<FONT COLOR=\"$colour_map{lc($word)}\">$line</FONT><BR/>\n";
}
else {
print "<FONT COLOUR=\"000000\">$line</FONT><BR/>\n";
}
}
(Not entirely sure if there's a way to tranpose a list of matches. I'll have another think).