in reply to Searchin' through values

huh? i don't understand... perhaps providing a snippit of your actual code would help clarify things...

you're using regex's aren't you? if not, read up on them here: perldoc re

sounds like you could probably use this or something similar depending on your actual source data...

m/ASP[a-z]/i # thats a literal 'ASP' # followed by a character class of 1 of any letter from a-z