Question

What do I use to search for multiple words in a string? I would like the logical operation to be AND so that all the words are in the string somewhere. I have a bunch of nonsense paragraphs and one plain English paragraph, and I’d like to narrow it down by specifying a couple common words like, ‘the’ and ‘and’, but would like it match all words I specify.

Answer 1

Maybe using a language recognition chart to recognize english would work. Some quick tests seem to work (this assumes paragraphs separated by newlines only).

The regexp will match one of any of those conditions… \bword\b is word separated by boundaries word\b is a word ending and just word will match it in any place of the paragraph to be matched.

my @paragraphs = split(/\n/,$text); for my $p (@paragraphs) {     if ($p =~ m/\bthe\b|\band\b|\ban\b|\bin\b|\bon\b|\bthat\b|\bis\b|\bare\b|th|sh|ough|augh|ing\b|tion\b|ed\b|age\b|’s\b|’ve\b|n’t\b|’d\b/) {        print 'Probable english\n$p\n';     } }