my $def="hashpatterns.txt"; my %dic=(); open(D, $def) || die "can't open definition file:$def\n"; while () { my ($oldp, $newp) = split /#/; $dic{$oldp}=$newp; } close(D); my $file="input.txt"; open(F, $file) || die "can't open definition file:$file\n"; open(W, '>out.txt') or die "can't write to file:$!\n"; my $line=join "", ; my $matchkey=join "|", keys %dic; $matchkey=qr /$matchkey/; $line =~ s%$matchkey%$dic{$matchkey}%g; print W $line; close(F);