Greetings,
I am working on a script that searches through files and verifies that naming conventions within the files follow certain standards. The names that I am checking are in the form aa_bb_cc_dd, of varying length and there may be numbers appended to some of the segments as here, aa_bb123_cc_dd. They may also take the form aa_cc, or cc_ee123_jj. bb doesn't have to immediatly follow aa, it just can't be before it. I have set up a definition file that has 21 "tiers". The def file looks something like:

aa = 0
ab = 0
bb = 1
bc = 1
cc = 2
cd = 2

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and so on. I am creating a hash from this file in the form $hash{aa} = 0. I then split each line from the file that I'm checking:
@segments = split("_", $line);

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and make sure that
$hash{$segment[0]} < $hash{$segment[1]}

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and so on. First, does anyone have a better way of doing this? Second, is there a way to pattern match the keys of the hash without cycling through all the keys for each line of the file being checked? The reason I would like to do this is that the numbers that can be appended to a given segment are subject to change, and this means a lot of maintenance of the definition file, which I would like to avoid. I would like to do something like have a key be ab\d+ and be able to match that key to ab123, is this possible?

In reply to hash keys and regex by state-o-dis-array

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