Thank you double back-slashes worked. I am also using DBI module, but my issue is that I wanted to to split result and perl giving me issues. I have $row = $feed_db->fetchrow_array() ; $row is social_going_home , but I only want home, I tried grepping, but it only returns 1 (which means its found) .I can split it and store values into an array and search the array, but I want a one liner.can you help?