Re: Regex on a variable with special characters

[haukex]

Hi jaydee,

$y =~ /^\Q$x\E/;

See also quotemeta and Mind the meta!

Update: Actually, you said "$y sometimes contains regex special characters" - my answer applies if $x contains special characters. If $y contains special characters and $x does not, you don't necessarily need to escape $x, although the general advice in Mind the meta! still applies that it's safer to always use \Q...\E except in the case that you intentionally want the contents of the variable being interpolated into the regex to be interpreted as a regex. Update 2: Clarified wording.

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D

[jaydee]

This is exactly was I was looking for. Thank you.

[Linicks]

Interesting - sometimes something easy becomes hard.

I rememeber years ago (as a sysadmin) when upgrading the network machines, one machine couldn't get an IP address from the DHCP server (all MS stuff, of course). It turned out there was a bug in the MS stack in such that machine called 'stores_01' failed - the underscore fubarred it.

So, keep the names sane, then the code can remain sane ~ and easy

Nick