As an aside, and at the risk of monopolising this thread, you might also want to take a look at 'index'. 
perldoc -f index

index STR,SUBSTR,POSITION
index STR,SUBSTR
      The index function searches for one string within another, but
      without the wildcard-like behavior of a full regular-expression
      pattern match. It returns the position of the first occurrence
      of SUBSTR in STR at or after POSITION. If POSITION is omitted,
      starts searching from the beginning of the string. The return
      value is based at "0" (or whatever you've set the "$[" variable
      to--but don't do that). If the substring is not found, returns
      one less than the base, ordinarily "-1".

[download]
---
my name's not Keith, and I'm not reasonable.

In reply to Re: Search and Replace fears by reasonablekeith
in thread Search and Replace fears by poltras

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.