I also was looking for a method to do this, preferably the fastest possible. With a relatively small array (256), the use List::Util qw(first); method was actually significantly slower than simply iterating through the array and breaking(last) out once the match was found. In my test example on a 2.5MB file doing a sort of Sbox type lookup, the iterating took about 3m45s on my old Atom netbook where as the use List::Util qw(first); method required over 5m. Does anyone know the fastest way to perform these index lookups? A few of the examples shown appear to be basically identical. Hashing an array(did I say that right?) is a concept I am not yet familiar with.

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.