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
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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";
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this configuration is always true.

such a strategy might work.