Nice work, AnomalousMonk, thank you!
I tried that in a script, getting it to read all the lines of data, and it works perfectly!  See below.

I'm now trying to change it so it handles the 4 updates in my original post.  I see it already handles update #1 re the '*'. How does it do that, given that you're using glob?

Below is your code as a full script with my attempted changes to make it process all the data, and to handle updates #3 & #4 commented out because they don't work.  Any suggestions on how to get them working?  And how to best fit update #2 in to your code?

And how is '' => '}' replacing the line ending?  I know \z matches the end, but those empty 'quotes' puzzle me. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my %globize = ('=' => '={',  ':' => '}:{',  '' => '}');
#my %globize = ('?What here?' => '{',  ':' => '}:{', '' => '}');
my (@globs, %hash);
while (<DATA>)
{
        my ($globule, $value) = split / /;
        chomp $value;
        $globule =~ s{ ([=:] | \z) }{$globize{$1}}xmsg;
        #$globule =~ s{ (\A | : | \z) }{$globize{$1}}xmsg;
        print qq{'$globule'}."\n";
        @globs = glob $globule;
        $hash{$_} = $value for @globs;
}
use Data::Dump; dd \%hash;

__DATA__
Prefix1:A,B:c,d value1=10
Prefix2:A:b,c:1,2 value2=20
Prefix3:A:*:1,2 value3=30
Prefix4:A:*:1,2 value4a=10|value4b=20
Prefix5,Prefix6:A:*:1,7 value5=10

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In reply to Re^3: Combinations of lists, etc by tel2
in thread Combinations of lists to a hash by tel2

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