In Perl, how can I match one string against a list of other strings?

Question

I want to check an element in an array, $columns[2], against a small list of strings. The way I have it now is;

if (   $columns[2] eq 'string1' 
    || $columns[2] eq 'string2' 
    || $columns[2] eq 'string3' 
    || ...) { 
   ...
}

It seems there must be a better way than all the OR's.

Answer 1

This is exactly what grep is for:

my $element_exists = 
   grep { $columns[2] eq $_ } qw(string1 string2 ... stringN);

An alternative would be to use first, which will stop processing once it finds a match. This way if you first string matches $columns[2] you don't have to compare the remaining n-1 strings:

use List::Util qw/first/;

my $element_exists = 
   defined first { $columns[2] eq $_ } qw(string1 string2 ... stringN);

You could also you any (as @ThisSuitIsBlackNot suggests below) for this purpose, the slight difference being that first returns the value of the element that matches the condition, any returns a boolean:

use List::Util qw/any/;

my $element_exists = 
   any { $columns[2] eq $_ } qw(string1 string2 ... stringN);