in reply to testing more than one item for equality

No, there is no more direct way to achieve that, afaik. You could get rid of the $result variable like this 
if (grep { $_ eq $item3 } ($item1, $item2)) {
  #do something
}

[download]
or of course write 
if ($item1 eq $item3 or $item2 eq $item3) { ... }

[download]

-- Hofmator

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