"exact" pattern matching

[my_nihilist]

Does perl have an exact pattern match feature so that i could accept a user-input string without having to parse it for regexp special characters?

[CountZero]

index seems to fit the requirement:

index STR,SUBSTR,POSITION
index STR,SUBSTR

The index function searches for one string within another, but without the wildcard-like behavior of a full regular-expression pattern match. It returns the position of the first occurrence of SUBSTR in STR at or after POSITION. If POSITION is omitted, starts searching from the beginning of the string. POSITION before the beginning of the string or after its end is treated as if it were the beginning or the end, respectively. POSITION and the return value are based at 0 (or whatever you've set the $[ variable to--but don't do that). If the substring is not found, index returns one less than the base, ordinarily -1.

Thus quoth the docs -- Amen!

[moritz]

Others have rightly mentioned index and eq.

There's also quotemeta and m/\Q$regex\E/ for escaping strings in a regex. (If you don't do anything else, the regex doesn't have any benefit over index, though. Except perhaps ease of use).

[my_nihilist]

hmmm...i see a pattern.

thanks.

[GrandFather]

Does eq (see Equality Operators) do what you want?

[my_nihilist]

No, I need to use it in a "search and replace" style. I think the only way to do that with "eq" would be to take the length of the string and then compare every segment of that length, advancing thru the data one character at a time. Parsing the string first will be easier.

Tk::text DOES have an "exact" match option (like the ones in your word processor, web browser, etc.) but i then need a way to apply the string from the GUI in searches of files that, for example, have not yet been loaded into the Tk GUI. I do think it's odd that we can't go:

if ($str=~/^?.../E)

where "E" would meaning ignoring special characters -- the equivalent of:

if ($str=~/\^\?\.\.\./)

[lima1]

What's wrong with index?? And you can of course ignore special chars in a regex.

$str=~/\Q  \E/

Upps, did not see the posting of moritz...

[jshin]

Not exactly sure what you mean by exact pattern matching...

Can you give an example of what you are trying to do?

You could always do something like

if($foo =~ m/quotemeta($user_input)/) {
print 'matches!';
}

or

if($foo eq $user_input) {
print 'matches!';
}

Probably not the answer you were looking for, but not sure what you mean by "exact" pattern matching.. Please give examples.

[wade]

Not sure how trusted your users are but, once you're done solving this problem, you might want to check out taint mode (do a perldoc perlsec).

[spacebat]

I agree with CountZero, it sounds like you want index() to get the starting position of the substring, then you can use substr() as an lvalue to assign your replacement string.

However this sounds like what regular expressions were designed for, so either quotemeta() or the following may be a better fit:

s/\Q$pattern\E/$replacement/g

[smokemachine]

eq?!