Perl Cookbook

Matching Abbreviations

Problem

Suppose you had a list of commands, such as "send", "abort", "list", and "edit". The user types one in, but you don’t want to make them type out the whole thing.

Solution

You can use the following technique if the strings all start with different characters or if you want to arrange the matches so one takes precedence over another, as "SEND" has precedence over "STOP" here:

chomp($answer = <>);
if    ("SEND"  =~ /^\Q$answer/i) { print "Action is send\n"  }
elsif ("STOP"  =~ /^\Q$answer/i) { print "Action is stop\n"  }
elsif ("ABORT" =~ /^\Q$answer/i) { print "Action is abort\n" }
elsif ("LIST"  =~ /^\Q$answer/i) { print "Action is list\n"  }
elsif ("EDIT"  =~ /^\Q$answer/i) { print "Action is edit\n"  }

Or you can use the Text::Abbrev module:

use Text::Abbrev;
$href = abbrev qw(send abort list edit);
for (print "Action: "; <>; print "Action: ") {
    chomp;
    my $action = $href->{ lc($_) };
    print "Action is $action\n";
}

Discussion

The first technique switches the typical order of a match. Normally you have a variable on the left side of the match and a known pattern on the right side. We might try to decide which action the user wanted us to take by saying $answer =~ /^ABORT/i, which is true if $answer begins with the string "ABORT". It matches whether $answer has anything after "ABORT", so "ABORT LATER" would still match. Handling abbreviations generally requires quite a bit of ugliness: $answer =~ /^A(B(O(R(T)?)?)?)?$/i.

Compare the classic "variable =~ pattern" with ...