The only thing in Perl which might be able to rival a hash look-up is a or-regex using the Tree° Trie optimization, especially if you have repeated patterns.

$in =~ m/^($STR1|$STR2|$STR3|...)$/

You should provide more details, for a definitive answer.

But a trie will always beat if-else with eq comparisons.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

updates

°) that's not the name... how was it called again... ah ... s/Tree/Trie/

> and does the "best" approach vary by scale?

yes. see ${^RE_TRIE_MAXBUF}

In reply to Re: Hash versus chain of elsifs by LanX
in thread Hash versus chain of elsifs by mldvx4

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.