I’ve just released version 1.00 of my Text::Match::FastAlternatives Perl module. Since I’m apparently declaring it stable, I thought it was worth writing up a description of what it does, and how it does it.

Suppose you have a large list of strings, and a set of keys, and you need to determine, for each of the strings, whether any of the keys occur in it. For example, the list of strings might be a list of user-agent headers sent to a web server, and the keys a set of strings that are good indicators of robots accessing your site; you want to calculate some server statistics, but disregard any robotic traffic.

How do you go about doing that?

[Also published here.]

Mastering Regular Expressions has been around for a long time — this is the third edition of a book originally published a decade ago. Does that actually reflect justified popularity, or is it just that this is the only book-length treatment of the various regex engines, how they differ, and how to get the most out of them? I’m glad to say that doesn’t seem to be case: if you use regexes in any depth at all, you should probably read this book.