Thus my need to know if a key in the table is a literal or a regex so I can do the right test to see if the key matches
Since the regex will have been stringified if used as a hash key, The only way I can think of doing that (if you can't store extra info in the hash value to indicate this) is to see if the key string matches /^\(\?.*\)$/. This will of course fail if an exact string match looks like "(?....)"

Dave.

In reply to Re^5: how to use string RE (against $_ and capture) by dave_the_m
in thread how to use string RE (against $_ and capture) by perl-diddler

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