And as has been discussed quite often here in the Monastery, actually using Switch.pm is a rather bad idea, as it attempts to parse Perl code and tends to fail in all sorts of unexpected and nasty ways. Switch::Perlish looks nice, but has to jump through a lot of loops in order to emulate switch as we know it from ie C, resulting in what looks like a negligible, if none at all, gain over a regular if/elseif/else construction. From personal experience I'd say either go for the fullblown if/elseif/else construction or, like in this case, use map or a hash.