Thanks - it seems that it would be best to split the strings into key value pairs, so that: makes comparison easier to deal with non exact matches, keys that may have a different value and thus would have been seen as a different key all together. Yea realize the found not found issue - was trying to get the foundational compare to work properly. I had tried the m/$string/ type of comparison earlier but that didn't work, tried the hash compare but didn't realize its limits. Good to see the escape regexp option too.