It looks like you're just doing the same thing to all the strings: you're wrapping some sort of terminal-display escape sequence around each matched string, but it's always the same escape sequence ( "\e[31m ... \e[0m"). So why do you need a look-up hash at all?

Also, it looks like you're keeping the open-angle-bracket but deleting the close-angle-bracket -- is that intentional, or a bug?

Here's how I would do it (assuming the close-angle-bracket should be kept): 

my $openesc = "\e[31m";
my $closesc = "\e[0m";

s/^(.*<)\:([a-z]+)/$1$openesc$2$closesc/;

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In reply to Re: Having a "default" hash value! by graff
in thread Having a "default" hash value! by Ace128

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