I have a simple script that searches for patterns in text, and then removes matches (the main line of code not much more than $line =~ s/$var//;).

I have discovered that if $var contains a set of parentheses, this does not work as expected (the text does not get removed).

I don't really understand the theory behind this (or what exactly happens), but I assume that I need to somehow pass the variable in a way to tell perl that I want to use the literal variable.

How do I do that? And what exactly does perl try to do with: 

$var = 'apple (banana) cherry';
$line = 'apple (banana) cherry kiwi lemon melon';
$line =~ s/$var//;

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In reply to newbie quoting question by Anonymous Monk

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