in reply to How to extract special charachetrs like <=, >= != from string

<, > = and ! are not that "special" for regular expressions.

They can be used inside a "[ ] Bracketed Character class" with capture (see perldoc perlre). 

perl -e '($x=shift()) =~/([=<>!]+)/ and print "\[$x] has \[$1]\n"' "Ra
+nge is != 4%"
[Range is != 4%] has [!=]

[download]

        Clarity: it's like that one thing that is not the other thing, except for when it is.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom