Re^5: Wildcard in a hash

[AnomalousMonk]

I'm pretty sure that the Anonymous Monk has the deductive, inductive and abductive logical skills to make some shrewd guesses about the specifications for your program. However, he/she/it isn't interested in writing your program for you, but rather in encouraging you to develop the skills to do these things for yourself.

Some general comments on the OPed code:

• $vline =~ s/^\S+//; #trim leading space     This trims all leading non-spaces:  \S (big-S) is the complement of the  \s (little-s) whitespace class.
• if ($_ =~ $identifier{$pins1.}) { ... }     This does not compile.

  c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
  "my %identifier = qw(one uno  two dos  three tres);
   ;;
   my $pins1 = 'two';
   $_ = 'xdosx';
   print 'match' if $_ =~ $identifier{$pins1.};
  "
  syntax error at -e line 1, near ".}"
  Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
  

  It's important to post example code that can actually run, even though it doesn't behave quite the way you want. Please see Short, Self-Contained, Correct Example.