note JavaFan <blockquote><em>Of course if you had meant the string $to_replace is an actual regex to match against, you're better off using the qr operator:</em></blockquote> I don't get this point. You started off that section with: <code> $to_replace='some_string'; $my_string=~ s/$to_replace/$better_data/; </code> and doomed this <em>catastrophically unsafe</em>, because <tt>$to_replace</tt> may actually contain characters that have a special meaning. <p> But if <tt>$to_replace</tt> is actually a regexp, the premises is gone -- any special characters are intentional. In fact, it's quite fine in that case to use the above. 964216 964216