As a data sculptor, you have no choice than chisel away unwanted chips. As a report constructing artist, you assemble your work from a pool of material.

That means, it all depends on whether you know what you are looking for, or rather want to remove all the stuff you know about and don't care, to "sieve the problem gold".

Maybe you can mix. Maybe at some stage of the process, extracting is cheaper, something like

    $entry{$k} =~ /($regex->{extract})/ and $entry{$k} = $1;
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- but it all depends on the input data and the aims of your reports.

Then, in some forgotten corner of the olde perl operators, there's still study sitting, which might - or not - speed things up.