An input element is always a superstring of the pattern. In other words: the pattern can be a substring, a submatch, of an input element. The inputs are matched against the pattern, not the other way round. Notice also that matching is not symmetric. But that feature will be turned on by a special modifier (just a guess: 'r'), so there should be no backward compatibility problem.

Note-on-note: some limited form of 'regular expressionism' is planned in future: for example character classes () and any-chars (.). They are characters just like the others. None of the regular expression notations (^. In scalar context return true if any of the inputs match, false if none match. In list context return the matched If no inputs are given, match against the $_. $any_matched = amatch('pattern', = amatch('pattern',, = amatch('pattern',, pattern approximately. String::Approx is more like regular expressions or index(), it finds substrings that are close matches.> MATCH use String::Approx 'amatch' String::Approx uses the Levenshtein edit distance as its measure, but String::Approx is not well-suited for comparing strings of different length, in other words, if you want a 'fuzzy eq', see above. The edit distance of 'lead' and 'gold' is therefore three, or 75%. For example, to transform 'lead' into 'gold', you need three edits: lead gead goad gold Required to transform a string to another string. It is the total number of 'edits': insertions, word world The measure of approximateness is the Levenshtein edit distance. If you want to compare things like text or source code, consisting of words or tokens and phrases and sentences, or expressions and statements, you should probably use some other tool than String::Approx, like for example the standard UNIX diff(1) tool, or the Algorithm::Diff module from CPAN. adist(), but their results sometimes differ from the bare Levenshtein et al.) (There are functions for this in String::Approx, e.g. See also Text::WagnerFischer and Text::PhraseDistance. If you want to compare strings for similarity, you probably just want the Levenshtein edit distance (explained below), the Text::Levenshtein and Text::LevenshteinXS modules in CPAN. NOTE: String::Approx suits the task of string matching, not string comparison, and it works for strings, not for text. With this you can emulate errors: typing errorrs, speling errors, closely related vocabularies (colour color), genetic mutations (GAG ACT), abbreviations (McScot, MacScot). String::Approx lets you match and substitute strings approximately. My = amatch('xyzzy', = amatch('plugh',, DESCRIPTION String::Approx - Perl extension for approximate matching (fuzzy matching) SYNOPSIS use String::Approx 'amatch'

Perl string compare