jdporter makes a very good point above. I just want to make it explicit because it's a fairly common over-generalization: If you're only testing for string equality, don't use regular expressions at all. I can't tell from your note whether that's the case or not, but if so, a regular expression is much more work than necessary.

In that case, using a hash as shown above will work, and will be faster, though it may consume more memory. Another alternative is to use a simple loop:

foreach (@target_strings)
{
   if ($data eq $_) { doSomething(); last; }
}
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(I'm guessing that you can short-circuit the loop if any one of the targets matches.)