I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you asking for a data structure where you can access the element name by the value and vice versa?

Or do you want an easy way to get the names of all form elements passed to your script? That's easy: my @elements = keys %FORM; Your assignment: $FORM{$name} = $value; sets up a good data structure for you already. All you have to do is treat %FORM like a normal hash (which it is). If you want the value of element 'color', do: my $color = $FORM{'color'}; Does that make sense? (By the way, you don't have to fear using CGI, as that module is included with the core distribution of any properly installed modern version of Perl.)