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Suppose I have a file containing lines I'm trying to match against:
foo
quux
bar
In my code, I have another array:
foo
baz
quux
Let's say we iterate through the file, calling each element $word, and the internal list we are checking against, @arr.
if( grep {$_ =~ m/^$word$/i} @arr)
This works correctly, but in the somewhat possible case where we have an test case of fo. in the file, the . operates as a wildcard operator in the regex, and fo. then matches foo, which is not acceptable.
This is of course because Perl is interpolating the variable into a regex.
The question:
How do I force Perl to use the variable literally?
794
Because backslash \ has special meaning in strings and regexes, if we would like to tell Perl that we really mean a backs-slash, we will have to "escape" it, by using the "escape character" which happens to be back-slash itself. So we need to write two back-slashes: \\.
Regular Expression (Regex or Regexp or RE) in Perl is a special text string for describing a search pattern within a given text. Regex in Perl is linked to the host language and is not the same as in PHP, Python, etc. Sometimes it is termed as “Perl 5 Compatible Regular Expressions“.
The operator =~ associates the string with the regex match and produces a true value if the regex matched, or false if the regex did not match. In our case, World matches the second word in "Hello World" , so the expression is true.
Use \Q...\E to escape special symbols directly in perl string after variable value interpolation:
if( grep {$_ =~ m/^\Q$word\E$/i} @arr)
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