I am writing a small script that reads single line entries from a file and then searches for that entry in another file. It all seemed to be working fine, until I encountered a situation where there were brackets in the line entry eg. abc (123). In this case, the code didn't find the entry, I am pretty sure because it's evaulating the bracket as part of pattern (regexp). Since I don't neccassrily know what data I will be getting, is there a way to force my variable to $entry to be interpreted as a string and not a regexp. The code below is a simplified version of what i am using... 
use FileHandle::Deluxe;
 
$fh = FileHandle::Deluxe->new("library.txt", allow_insecure_code=>1, a
+uto_chomp=>1);
my $library = $fh->contents;
 
open (DATA, "input.txt");
while (<DATA>)
{
  chomp($_);
  $entry = $_;
 
  if ($library =~ /$entry/i)
  {
    print "found - $entry\n";
  }
  else
  {
    print "new - $entry\n";
  }
}

[download]
Thanks in advance.

In reply to Pattern matching with a variable by Anonymous Monk

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