Search::Dict(3perl)

💖 Search::Dict 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the Perl Programmers Reference Guide page for Search::Dict — yes, we're in section 3perl of the manuals, and this little cutie is the one whose whole job is: look — search for a key in a dictionary file 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

Search::Dict — look — search for key in dictionary file 🎀

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

use Search::Dict;
look *FILEHANDLE, $key, $dict, $fold;

use Search::Dict;
look *FILEHANDLE, $key, $params;

two ways to call her, pick your fighter 💅

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👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

so what it does is it sets the file position in FILEHANDLE to be the first line greater than or equal to $key — and yes, that comparison is stringwise (we're doing strings here, not numbers, no cap).

It returns the new file position as its value. And if something goes wrong? It returns -1. 😭 an error happened, bestie, and it is telling you with a very sad little minus one.

The flags are the ones that decide dictionary order and case folding, so let's get into it:

• $dict — if this one is true, we search by dictionary order, which means ignoring anything that isn't a word character or whitespace. The default is to honour all characters. (periodt, no filtering by default)
• $fold — if this one is true, we ignore case. The default is to honour case, i.e. uppercase and lowercase are just different, deal with it 💅

okay now the spicy part. If there are only three arguments and that third argument is a hash reference, then the keys of that hash can have the values "dict", "fold", and "comp" or "xfrm" (more on those below 👇) — and the values hanging off those keys get used as the parameters. cute, right? 🎀

so about those two special subroutines:

• If a comparison subroutine (comp) is defined, it must return less than zero, zero, or greater than zero — depending on whether the first comparand is less than, equal to, or greater than the second comparand. That's the contract, bestie, don't break it 🫶
• If a transformation subroutine (xfrm) is defined, its value gets used to transform the lines read from the filehandle before their comparison. so like, makeover first, compare later ✨

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ngl the -1 on error is the only dramatic part of this whole module. everything else is just vibes and string comparison 💀

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🦋 this one came from perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, and it lives in the Search::Dict(3perl) corner of the manual. go forth and binary-search your dictionaries, main character 🌈💖