It always pays to take a look onto when searching for a solution. It looks to me that Tie::Pick is exacly what you want.

As for the list reference you might need, it's no crime to dereference it explicitely in order to use simpler structures , like say 
my $candidates_ref = $hash{"DEC012008"};

[download]
Hth

Krambambuli
---

In reply to Re^2: Array Element Deletion by Krambambuli
in thread Array Element Deletion by rpike

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