Hi all, sorry if this is a naive question but I've searched around the web and haven't found a good answer, including https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre#Metacharacters.

How do I match a regex that contains metacharacters that are used in matching, such as asterisks, parens, etc.? Without escaping each?

I have two variables set, both containing asterisks, and a regex comparison:

#! /usr/bin/perl
my $v1 = "*hello";
my $v2 = "*hello";

if ($v1 =~ /$v2/){
 print "match\n";    
}

[download]

This obviously results in a Quantifier follows nothing in regex error. I can escape out the asterisk and it works fine:

$v2 =~ s/\*/\\\*/g;

[download]

But is there a more elegant way to do that, one that might also pick up some of the others?

thanks

In reply to regex matching on metacharacters by slugger415

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