You say database, but your example suggest that you mean hash. Let's assume you do indeed mean hash. So, you have a hash, and are looking for the key/value pair, where the value is one of "with", "this", "please". I'd do something like: 
    my @matches = qw /with this please/;
  OUTER:
    while (my ($key, $value) = each %hash) {
        foreach my $match (@matches) {
            if ($match eq $value) {
                print "$key: $value";
                last OUTER;
            }
        }
    }

[download]

Or you could make a regex and match against the regex.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Searching a database by Abigail-II
in thread Searching a database by Anonymous Monk

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