Search for multiple terms in perl - perl

Question

I have a file with more than hundred single column entries. I need to search for each of these entries into a file of multiple column and more than thousand entries and need a output file. I tried these codes:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
print "Enter the input file name:";
my $inputfile = <STDIN>;
chomp($inputfile);
print "\nEnter the search file name:";
my $searchfile=<STDIN>;
chomp($searchfile);
open (INPUTFILE, $inputfile) || die;
open (SEARCHFILE, $searchfile) || die;
open (OUT, ">write.txt") || die;
while (my $line=<SEARCHFILE>){
while (<INPUTFILE>) {
if (/$line/){
print OUT $_;
}
}
}
close (INPUTFILE) || die;
close (SEARCHFILE) || die;
close (OUT) || die;
The output file has only one line. It has searched the term from the search file into input file, but only for the first term, not for all. Please help!

Answer 1

When you read INPUTFILE in the inner loop, it's read to the end during the first round of SEARCHFILE. Because it's not reset, the filehandle is used up and will always return eof.
If there are hundreds of lines, but not several 100,000 you can easily read it into an array first and then use that for the lookup. The fact that it's single-column makes that very easy. Note that this is less efficient then the alternative solution below.
chomp( my #needles = <SEARCHFILE> );
while (<INPUTFILE>) {
foreach my $needle (#needles) {
print OUT $_ if m/\Q$needle\E/; # \Q end \E quote regex meta chars
}
}
Alternatively you can also build one large lookup regex that matches all the strings in one go. That is probably faster than iterating the array for each line.
# open ...
chomp( my #needles = <SEARCHFILE> );
my $lookup = join '|', map quotemeta, #needles;
my $lookup_regex = qr/$lookup/; # possibly with /i?
while (my $line = <INPUTFILE>) {
print OUT $line if $line =~ $lookup_regex;
}
The quotemeta takes care of strings that contain regex meta characters like / or | or even .. It's the same as using \Q and \E as above.
Please also use three-argument-open and named filehandles.
open my $fh_searchfile, '<', $searchfile or die $!;
open my $fh_inputfile, '<', $inputfile or die $!;
open my $fh_out, '>', 'write.txt' or die $!;
chomp( my #needles = <$fh_searchfile> );
# ...
The three-argument-open is important because you are taking user input and using it as the filename directly. A malicious user could enter something like | rm -rf *, which would open a pipe to a delete all my files without asking program. Oops. But if you specify the '<' read open method explicitly in its own parameter, the method characters are ignored in the third param.
The lexical filehandle $fh is, as the name says, lexical, while INPUTFILE is a GLOB, which makes it global. That's not so bad if you only have this one script and no modules, but as soon as you deal with different packages it becomes problematic because those are super-global and every part of the program sees them. That can lead to name collisions and weird stuff happening.