My problem has come in being able to recognize when I have a regex vs. a regular string in a key. I tried using a "ref $re", looking for a Regexp (no go), and I tried looking for "qr" -- only works if you store qr as a string initially, and try to evaluate it later. That's what I ended up trying to do. Looking for something like "(?" makes me a bit less comfortable than searching for "qr", though -- it looks a bit sloppy for some reason, but maybe I'm just not used it.