+ is a special character in regular expressions that means match one or more of what is before me... your regexp will match one or more a's followed by a b... i.e. aaab ab aaaaaab, to match a plus you must escape it, using a \ so \+ will match a plus... see perlre

Update Doh, my eyes skipped the lower text... :)

you need the \\ because "" interploates data, thus converting \+ to + before it gets to the regexp... if you use single quotes 'a\+b' then you will be ok.

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In reply to Re: matching the + character by suaveant
in thread matching the + character by jalebie

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