#!/usr/local/bin/perl use strict; my @array = ( 'account_trend', 'trend_report', 'revenuebytrafficker', 'ticketstatus', 'lostinventory', 'campaigndetail', 'campaignsummary', 'packagesummary', 'placementsummary', 'bookedbyaccount', 'bookedbysalesperson', 'accounttrends', 'salespersontrends', 'salessitetrend', 'placementperformance', 'packageperformance', 'forcastsummary' ); my @values = ( '??m*', 'reve*ker', 'accoun*end', ); for ( @values ) { print "mask: $_\n"; my $regex = mask2re ($_); print "re $regex\n"; print join ("\n", grep { /$regex/ } @array), "\n\n"; } #turns a simple mask into a regex where * means #none ore more chars amd ? means exactly one char sub mask2re { #replacements (after quotemeta) my %map = ( "\\*" => ".*?", "\\?" => ".", ); #quotema everything my $re = quotemeta ($_[0]); #replace * and ? by regex active statements $re =~ s/(\\[\*|\?])/$map{$1}/g; #return compiled regex return qr/^$re/; }