Without looking at your code too closely, I see some areas for improvement. As a good rule of thumb, don't alternate on single characters. By adding strict (and switching the alternation to character classes for a performance boost), I got your script to work:

use strict;
my $tstr = 'abc äÄöÖüÜß test';

my %subsTable = (
    'ä' => 'ae', 'Ä' => 'AE', 'ö' => 'oe', 'Ö' => 'OE',
    'ü' => 'ue', 'Ü' => 'UE', 'ß' => 'ss'
);
my $notInSQL = qr{['`´",%\$]};
my $inSQL = qr{[`´",\$]};

sub blah { 
    my $str = shift; 
    my $regex = join "", map { quotemeta $_ } keys %subsTable;
    $regex = "[$regex]";
    print "Regex: $regex\n";
    $str =~ s/($regex)/$subsTable{$1}/g;
    return $str
};


print "orig : $tstr\n";
print blah($tstr)."\n";
[download]

When I added strict, I immediately discovered that you had referred to %subsTable as %subsHash in your subroutine. By switching the variable name, it worked fine.

Cheers,
Ovid

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