You could use the short-cut behaviour of boolean operators like this: 
$level =
    $access{$item} ||
    $item =~ /^([^:]+):/ && $access{"$1:*"} ||
    $access{'*'} ||
    0;

[download]
Note that this assumes your %access hash does not contain boolean false values, as your initial solution did. To actually check for the presence of these keys in the hash, the exists function will help.

In reply to Re: Tidy up conditions by martin
in thread Tidy up conditions by tel2

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