Question

Four very identical regular expressions. I am replacing the strings with the following scalar values. How can this be more efficient?

$line =~ s/\[(receiver)\]/$receiver/g;
$line =~ s/\[(place)\]/$place/g;
$line =~ s/\[(position)\]/$position/g;
$line =~ s/\[(company)\]/$company/g;

Thank you.

Answer 1

Consider just using a real templating system. Template Toolkit for instance is very easy.

Leaving that aside, you say you want it more efficient. Is its current perceived inefficiency a problem? If not, leave it alone.

You could do it all in one pass:

my %subst = (
    'receiver' => $receiver,
    'place'    => $place, 
    'position' => $position,
    'company'  => $company,
);
$line =~ s/\[(receiver|place|position|company)\]/$subst{$1}/g;

but this will act differently if, for instance, $receiver is ‘place’.