I'm not sure I like the following solution, but how about turning your hash keys into regular expressions?

my $data = <<EOT;
This is just lines of text here, and also there.  Consider
this human readable text; it's full of letters and
punctuation.
EOT

my %table = ( '\b[Ll]ines of text\b' => "foo.html",
              '\b[Tt]his\b'          => "bar.html",
              '\b[Ii]t\'?s full\b'   => "foobar.html" );

$data =~ s/($_)/<a href="$table{$_}">$1<\/a>/g foreach keys %table;

print $data;
[download]

The above seems to work, but if you have 5000+ keys, that's going to take a huge amount of time to code and run about as fast as a one-legged dog. There's also the problem that it's easy to write inefficient regexes.

The other idea that comes to mind is using the String::Approx module to try to match the keys to text. The problem with that is that it will be slower and more error prone :(

tedv wrote:

Of course, we link the initial This but not the this starting line 2.

Why "of course"? Can you explicitly state a rule? Are you only trying to match the first occurrence of each string? If so, take off the /g on the substitution and it will work much faster.

Cheers,
Ovid

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