Fellow Monasterians,

This my be slightly OT for a PM SoPW question, but ... In my HTML I allow the user to click groups of 3 consecutive letters to narrow what will be displayed in a list.

HTML:
<a href="../cgi-bin/listusers.pl?alpha=ABC">ABC</a>
<a href="../cgi-bin/listusers.pl?alpha=DEF">DEF</a>
etc....

[download]

My Perl attempts to set up the appropriate REGEXP in a MySQL SELECT statement to return only those lastnames beginning with those letters: 

my $alpha = $query->param('alpha');

$alpha =~ /(\w)(\w)(\w)/;
$stmt = "SELECT * FROM teamnew ORDER BY lastname WHERE lastname REGEXP
+ '^$1|^$2|^$3'";

[download]

But I keep getting an error that there is a syntax error in my SELECT statement. A print Dumper for $stmt shows: 

"SELECT * FROM teamnew ORDER BY lastname WHERE lastname REGEXP '^A|^B|
+^C'"

[download]
which appears fine. What am I missing? TIA.


—Brad
"The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men." George Eliot

20050204 Edit by castaway: Changed title from 'Setting up a MySQL REGEXP in Perl'

In reply to (OT) Setting up a MySQL REGEXP in Perl by bradcathey

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.