Don't know if my idea fits your data. Maybe it helps anyway after tweaking. 

$userinput =~ s/[^a-z]+/,/gi; # replace anything but a-z by comma

my $q = "SELECT * FROM <table> WHERE <column> IN ($userinput)";

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In reply to Re: Matching in the Database... by RL
in thread Matching in the Database... by ropey

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