Currently i am working through those perldoc pages, cheers for the pointer. i do not need the variable as a hash key, i apologize if my question seemed to suggest that, i am really looking for a pattern in $var1 in which on the last letter changes to any character, hence the a-z section of the regex. i presume i have to reference the whole section:

/($var2[a-z]{1})/
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Do reference within the regex? i tried the $n..$1 approach an it just returned blank lines( the correct number of blank lines for the match though...) sorry for the confusion pdotcot