Let me first explain the situation. A dropdown menu is created using @var. When a value is selected from the dropdown menu and submitted to the form, that submitted value is checked with the array to see if anything was tampered (nothing is considered acceptable input). Problem is what with grep, i can't seem to get metacharacters to match. The following is a snippet of the problem. 
$input = '$b'; 
@var = ('a','$b','$c','d','e','$f','g'); 
unless (grep /^$input$/, @var or $var eq "") { print "error"; }

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if i replace $b with e (with no metacharacters), the program snippet works fine. maybe i'm approaching this the wrong way. Does anyone have a better solution, something simple, yet flexible?

In reply to checking input using grep() by Parham

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