Thanks for the info. I also noticed that if I use a reg exp. in the "grep", it will still match if this value:  my $search = "2016101";
I changed the result line to this:

my $result = ( grep $_->{date} eq $search, @{ $data } ) ? 'Found' : 'N
+ot Found';
[download]

My list isn't too big and it is one less module to load into to rest of the code.