Perl regular expression using a variable as a search string with Perl operator characters included

Question

text to search    example text with  foo  and more    search string     foo     if   text to search    m  search string       print  wee     Please observe the above code  For some reason I would like to find the text   foo   in the  text to search variable and print  wee  if I find it  To do this I would have to ensure that the   and   is substituted with   and   to make Perl treat it as characters instead of operators   How can I do this without having to first replace   and   with    and    using a s    expression

User · Answer

Use  Q to autoescape any potentially problematic characters in your variable   if  text to search    m  Q search string   print  wee

User · Answer

Use the quotemeta function    text to search    example text with  foo  and more    search string   quotemeta   foo     print  wee  if   text to search      search string

User · Answer

You can use quotemeta   Q  E  if your Perl is version 5 16 or later  but if below you can simply avoid using a regular expression at all   For example  by using the index command   if  index  text to search   search string   gt  -1        print  wee

[regex] Perl regular expression (using a variable as a search string with Perl operator characters included)

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