note delirium I think we can solve this without doing any fancy sorting or iterating. How about a simple regular expression approach using upper and lower case characters as our markers? <p> <code>#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; $\ = $/; my $string = 'eichenbaumschule'; my @query = qw(baum ums eic chu le); $string =~ s/$_/uc $_/ieg for @query; @query = $string =~ /([A-Z]+)/g; print for @query; __OUTPUT__ EIC BAUMSCHULE </code> 366569 366569