Someone asked on Perlmonks if a hash could do fuzzy matches on keys - this is the result. If there's no exact match on the key that you pass to the hash, then the key is treated as a regex and the first matching key is returned. You can force it to leap straight into the regex checking by passing a qr'ed regex into the hash like this: my $val = $h{qr/key/}; exists and delete also do regex matching. In the case of delete all values matching your regex key will be deleted from the hash. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Tie-Hash-Regex/