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It depends on what you want the search to do:
if you want to find all matches, use the built-in grep:
my @matches = grep { /pattern/ } @list_of_strings;
if you want to find the first match, use first in List::Util:
use List::Util 'first';
my $match = first { /pattern/ } @list_of_strings;
if you want to find the count of all matches, use true in List::MoreUtils:
use List::MoreUtils 'true';
my $count = true { /pattern/ } @list_of_strings;
if you want to know the index of the first match, use first_index in List::MoreUtils:
use List::MoreUtils 'first_index';
my $index = first_index { /pattern/ } @list_of_strings;
if you want to simply know if there was a match, but you don't care which element it was or its value, use any in List::Util:
use List::Util 1.33 'any';
my $match_found = any { /pattern/ } @list_of_strings;
All these examples do similar things at their core, but their implementations have been heavily optimized to be fast, and will be faster than any pure-perl implementation that you might write yourself with grep, map or a answered 2010-05-27T23:58:57.523
If you will be doing many searches of the array, AND matching always is defined as string equivalence, then you can normalize your data and use a hash.
my @strings = qw( aAa Bbb cCC DDD eee );
my %string_lut;
# Init via slice:
@string_lut{ map uc, @strings } = ();
# or use a for loop:
# for my $string ( @strings ) {
# $string_lut{ uc($string) } = undef;
# }
#Look for a string:
my $search = 'AAa';
print "'$string' ",
( exists $string_lut{ uc $string ? "IS" : "is NOT" ),
" in the array\n";
Let me emphasize that doing a hash lookup is good if you are planning on doing many lookups on the array. Also, it will only work if matching means that $foo eq $bar, or other requirements that can be met through normalization (like case insensitivity).