Just to expand a little on what Tanktalus said... instead of creating a regular expression with the qr// quote, you just created a normal string that happened to contain a perl expression. 
my $word = "Apple";

my $pattern_quoted = "qr/^(Orange|Apple|Grape|Halibut)$/i";

print "Pattern matched\n" if ($word =~ m/$pattern_quoted/);
print "Eval'd pattern matched\n" if ($word =~ eval($pattern_quoted));

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In reply to Re: Why doesn't my qr// work? by crashtest
in thread Why doesn't my qr// work? by equant

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