Aha, that certainly comes under the heading of "am I missing something", yes. Of course it's better that way. Mind you even better (going completely the other way) would be to dump it into a simple tied-hash database of some kind. That way you'd have it on disk for later if you wanted to do other things to it. I'd just use dbm if it was me.
($_='kkvvttuubbooppuuiiffssqqffssmmiibbddllffss')
=~y~b-v~a-z~s; print