Hello, I recently started on a project to improve a bit of my code and thought this would be an easy point, but am not finding much information to address what I'm trying to do. I have a MySQL database that I populate with data points from text files. Today I do most of the gleaning of that information from a hodge-podge of PHP code. I was trying to move the searching and matching to perl instead, figuring I could work in a lot of improvements at the same time. For instance, I have a table in the database holding Artists. In my perl script, I connect to MySQL, get the artists out and put them into a hash. Next I open the relevant text file, grab every line and place that into an array. I then want to check each item in the array and see if it matches an item from the hash. This works wonderfully like this: 
for (my $i=0;$i<=$#lines;$i++){
  if(exists $artists{$lines[$i]})

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But I was hoping to add some ranking of the match to present the user with the most likely artist for that text file. I would eventually write the matches back into a MySQL table to present later. I'm thinking an exact full line match = 256, a case insensitive full line match = 128, a partial word match = 64, etc. Then I could add up all of the matches for one artist and rank them for the user. I'm surprised to not find a method to do this without re-inventing the wheel. Am I going about this wrong? Any wisdom to point me in a different direction? Thanks!

In reply to Hash Search Ranking by hoyt

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