title: Searching with Hash in Perl
body: <p>I am using a hash containing 5000 items to match words in a sentence, it so occurs that when I match for eg: <code>if($hash{$word}){Do Something}</code> sometimes it happens that the period occurs in the word and even if it is a match the presence of period results in a non-match. Can anything be done to ignore any punctuations when matching with hashes? </p>