You might want to look into Text::Template.

Regarding using format in a loop, you would just loop through the list of items returned from the database and do a write for each.

---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';
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