You answered your own question. A hash is a good way to go. Just translate the text in your question into code: 

use strict;
use warnings;

my %punct = (
                '?' => 'question mark',
                ',' => 'comma',
                '(' => 'open bracket', # per your terminology
            );

while( my ( $symbol, $descr ) = each %punct )
{
    print "[$symbol] = $descr\n";
}

[download]

Note the use strict; and use warnings at the top. :-)

Update: A quick search of CPAN reveals Acme::MetaSyntactic::punctuation, which may already have what you need.

In reply to Re: punctuation search (different!) by bobf
in thread punctuation search (different!) by Yoda_Oz

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