Quoting strings in regexps

Bilbo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is there a simple way to quote strings in regexps so that it is not necessary to escape individual special characters? For example, if I have a fragment of code like this:

my $string = 'Some text with $ signs in it';
my $pattern = '$ signs';

$string =~ s/$pattern/dollar signs/;
print "$string\n"
[download]

in which $pattern could contain characters with special regexp meanings is there a way to make this work "sensibly" without using one or more previous regexps to escape all the special characters (ie in this case convert $pattern to '\$ signs').

Comment on Quoting strings in regexps Download Code

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Re: Quoting strings in regexps by japhy (Canon) on Jul 19, 2002 at 19:07 UTC
Simply use the `\Q` escape. `if ($str =~ /\Q$pat/) { ... } if ($str =~ /.\Q$pat\E./) { ... }` [download] _____________________________________________________ Jeff`[japhy]`Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a job (NYC-area) `s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;`	[reply] [d/l]