This doesn't do what you want it to. Let's take a small example:

%hash = (a   => 1,
         ab  => 1,
         abc => 1,
         ac  => 1);
$key = 'ab';
[download]

Your first code would return ('ab', 'abc'). The code I'm replying to will return ('a', 'ab').

Let's examine the problem. You need to find all the keys that start or end with a given string. To do this, you need to get a list of the keys.

Now, once you have that list of keys, treat it as if it's just a list of strings with no duplicates. The shortest Perl code to find this would be:

my @list_of_keys = sort grep /(^$search|$search$)/o, keys %hash;
[download]

There are a few optimizations you can do (I'd think of more, but I haven't had my first pot of coffee yet):

• Remove all the keys that are shorter than your search string.
• Convert the regex to a substr. (This should take care of the keys that are too short, too.)

Putting both together yields:

my @list_of_keys = sort grep { substr($_, 0, length($search)) eq $sear
+ch || 
                               substr($_, -length($search)) eq $search
+ }, 
                        keys %hash;
[download]

</code> Please note that this code is completely untested.

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