I was hoping to use place holders, but I don't see any way for the place holders to also contain the text beyond the values. At best I can run a loop to build the string for all the LIKE bits, but it doesn't seem to offer a good gain.

Example:

  if ( $query{hostname} )
  {
     $query = $query . " AND host_name LIKE '$query{hostname}' ESCAPE 
+'!'";
  }
  if ( $query{ip_address} )
  {
     $query = $query . " AND ip_address LIKE '$query{ip_address}' ESCA
+PE '!'";
  }
# etc...
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