Good afternoon monks. I am trying to do a variable substitution in a regexp that contains a reference to a special variable and it's not working. When I try to do the same substitution directly it works, as illustrated in this simplified example (in reality I'm trying to do this with many different search/replace strings): 
$string = "firstword secondword";
print "original: $string\n";
# doesn't work
$search = '(second.+)';
$replace = '$1 thirdword';
($varsub = $string) =~ s/$search/$replace/;
print "variable substitution: $varsub\n";
# does work
($direct = $string) =~ s/(second.+)/$1 thirdword/;
print "direct: $direct\n";

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How do I get perl to recognize the special variable in the $replace string?

Steve

In reply to Regexp variable substitution of special variable by cormanaz

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