At the risk of being flamed back to initiate level I ask this: Given a Regexp reference, is there a safe (or known) way to get the underlying regexp? For example, given this code: 

my $x = qr/^foo\.c$/;
print "$x\n";

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I get this result:

(?-xism:^foo\.c$)

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which would suggest just extracting what follows the (?-xism:, preceding the final paren would do it. Seems like very cheesy coding though.

The reason for this is an interface that accepts a list of arguments as file matching arguments. If the argument is a scalar, it's assumed to be a wildcard pattern which is converted to a regexp. If it's a Regexp reference it's obviously a regexp. Right now the interface simply converts all to a list of regexp's then loops through that list at match time. I was contemplating converting the list to a | alternation regexp for a single match, but I'd need to "undo" the Regexp references to do that.

In reply to Getting regexp from Regexp references by steves

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