The dash (or hyphen) has no special meaning in general regular expressions (except in character classes). So there is absolutely no problem with: 
if ($text =~ /Screening Ligands by X-ray Crystallography/) {
     say "MATCH!";
} else {
     say "NOPE!";
}

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Please note that the code you showed has an extra closing curly brace.

I also agree with Anonymous Monk that a regex might not be the ideal solution for your problem. The index built-in is likely to work faster, and the use of a hash might also be considered, but we don't know enough about what you are trying to do to be able to help you more precisely.

Je suis Charlie.

In reply to Re: Regular Expression Hiccup by Laurent_R
in thread Regular Expression Hiccup by Mindsword

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