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Well said, ozo. &nbsp;TIMTOWTDI.<br />
<br />
In your first solution, I guess I could omit the '\E' in this case.<br />
<br />
Thank you. &nbsp;That's just what I was after.<br />
tel2
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Well said, ozo.  TIMTOWTDI.

In your first solution, I guess I could omit the '\E' in this case.

Thank you.  That's just what I was after.
tel2

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<div class="content wysiwyg-content">
Hi Experts,<br />
<br />
I'm having trouble with a Perl regex which tests whether one string is contained in another. &nbsp;In real life, the data comes from a file and a database, but the code snippet below demonstrates the issue:<br />
<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; $var1 = 'A [B:2013-03] C';<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; $var2 = '[B:2013-03]';<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; print &quot;Match!\n&quot; if $var1 =~ /$var2/;<br />
<br />
The above gives this error message:<br />
Invalid [] range &quot;3-0&quot; in regex; marked by &lt;-- HERE in m/[B:2013-0 &lt;-- HERE 3]/ at ./sub.pl line 3.<br />
<br />
How can I best avoid this problem and get the match to work by <u>ignoring the meta characters</u>?<br />
<br />
I know I could escape the [] in $var2, like this:<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; $var2 = '\[B:2013-03\]';<br />
but I'm hoping there's a cleaner way.<br />
<br />
Thanks.<br />
tel2
</div>
</div>


Hi Experts,

I'm having trouble with a Perl regex which tests whether one string is contained in another.  In real life, the data comes from a file and a database, but the code snippet below demonstrates the issue:

    $var1 = 'A [B:2013-03] C';
    $var2 = '[B:2013-03]';
    print "Match!\n" if $var1 =~ /$var2/;

The above gives this error message:
Invalid [] range "3-0" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/[B:2013-0 <-- HERE 3]/ at ./sub.pl line 3.

How can I best avoid this problem and get the match to work by ignoring the meta characters?

I know I could escape the [] in $var2, like this:
    $var2 = '\[B:2013-03\]';
but I'm hoping there's a cleaner way.

Thanks.
tel2

Perl regex ignoring [] meta characters

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages with over 25 years of development. Perl 5 runs on over 100 platforms from portables to mainframes and is suitable for both rapid prototyping and large-scale development projects.  Perl gained widespread popularity as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripting language, in part due to its regular expression and string parsing abilities. In addition to CGI, Perl is used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications.

Perl

A regular expression ("regex") is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching, i.e. "find and replace"-like operations. Regular expression processors are found in several search engines, search and replace dialogs of several word processors and text editors, and in the command lines of text processing utilities, such as sed and AWK. Many programming languages provide regular expression capabilities, some built-in, for example Perl, JavaScript, Ruby, AWK, and Tcl, and others via a standard library, for example .NET languages, Java, Python and C++ (since C++11). Most other languages offer regular expressions via a library.