Yes, you can still use the method suggested by dws (or my variant thereof) but you'll have to restructure your user hash like my  %users: 
use strict;
my %users = ();
my %matches = ();
my %search = (
       sex => 'F',
       age => 19,
       st  => 'FL'
);

## load users hash
foreach (<DATA>) {
   chomp;
   my ($user, $sex, $age, $st) = split /\|/;
   $users{$user}{sex} = $sex;
   $users{$user}{age} = $age;
   $users{$user}{st}  = $st;
}

## Perform searches
foreach my $user (keys %users) {
   my $match = 1;
   foreach my $key (keys %search) {
      $match = 0, last if $users{$user}{$key} ne $search{$key};
   }
   $matches{$user}++ if $match;
}

## Print out the matches (if any)
foreach (keys %matches) {
   print "user: '", $_,
         "'  sex: '", $users{$_}{sex},
         "'  age: '", $users{$_}{age},
         "'  st: '",  $users{$_}{st}, "'\n";
}

print "No matches found!\n" if not %matches;

__DATA__
JOE|M|18|AL
SUE|F|18|MS
BOB|M|19|CA
EVE|F|20|FL
PAM|F|19|FL
ABE|M|18|FL
NAN|F|19|CA

[download]
Note that this could be very slow if you have a large number of users and/or a large number of criteria to match. Worst case is criteria count * user count iterations. I'm not the greatest at optimizing code, so no doubt there are more efficient ways to do it (TAMEWTDI).

--Jim

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Search Categories - Most efficient way by jlongino
in thread Search Categories - Most efficient way by perleager

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