I was operating under the assumption that a user could enter "Kevin Johnson" and still get the value for $phnums{'kevin'} - i.e. more than what might be used as the explicit hash key. Possibly a poor assumption, but I couldn't think of a better reason for using regexen in the OP's code :-)

I recently ran across a hash setup as a dispatch table where most values were well defined, but some could match a variety - these were handled (in a generalized manner) like so:

if( exists $hash{$key} ){
    &$hash{$key};
}
elsif( $key =~ /phrase/ ){
    # several could match but all required the same action
    &$hash{'some_action'};
}
else {
    &$hash{'default_action'};
}
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s**lil*;  $*=join'',sort split q**;  s;.*;grr; &&s+(.(.)).+$2$1+; $; =
qq-$_-;s,.*,ahc,;$,.=chop for split q,,,reverse;print for($,,$;,$*,$/)
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