I must not be making myself clear.

The point of a hash is that a hash itself can find a value for a given key trivially.

$value_you_are_looking_for = $category{$variable};
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There's no searching required. If there's an element with a key of $variable, then $value_you_are_looking_for has it. Otherwise, it gets undef.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker