http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1017298


in reply to Using special characters in left part of a regex match?

> Is there a way to put special characters in the left part of the regular expression?

with special characters you mean the regex wildcards you're including for ... and the answer is no.

in short

$var[1] = "Gallia est omnis divisa in .+"; $var[5] = "Gallia est .+ tres"; $var[1] =~ $var[5] ;# false

what could maybe work is to successively strip common beginning and/or ending parts.

"Gallia est ..." is the smallest starting substring till an ellipsis.

Deleting it from both strings:

$var[1] = "omnis divisa in ..."; $var[5] = "... tres";

this configuration is always true.

such a strategy might work.

Cheers Rolf

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Re^2: Using special characters in left part of a regex match?
by shamat (Acolyte) on Feb 06, 2013 at 16:56 UTC
    Thank you for the suggestion, I really appreciate it! I'll try your strategy, which I think may work well with syntactical variations as well.