Hi Monks! I am having a prob with matching characters for a part of a counter script. The purpose of this part of the script is to count how many times the $constant variable (provided upon execution) appears in the file. The problem is occurring when the $constant varible is a special variable $, $$, ##, @@, etc. I have to assume that the $constant can be anything under the sun as this is a generic script, but with my code below I am not able to accomplish that. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! 

$constant = '$$';
$line_count =0;
while (<FILE>){
  if($constant ne "") {
     if($_ =~ m/^($constant)/) {
       $line_count++;
     }
  }
}

[download]


Thank you all for your input! I have my code working using quotemeta.

In reply to Issue with regex matching by sowais

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.