update, ca 5 mins after posting: bmann posted correct answer just about same time as tye was helping me see my error on the cb. Thanks all! (solution: s/\Q$delete_candidate\E//)

This started out as demo-answer to a node now-deleted (because it was near identical dupe of another, [id://#548211], which has data slightly different).

But then, ka-ching!, AS 5.8.6 on W2K spat an error I did not expect, to wit: "Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/* <-- HERE ...

Well, as you can see in code below, that's not exactly what's in the regex, but it's sorta' close to what's in line 7. BTW: data in this code is as OP posted, except this has more lines and varying years.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use vars qw ( $string_in_file $delete_candidate @data_out $data_out );
foreach (<DATA> ) {
   $string_in_file = $_;  # get the latest line from the file to the v
+ar
   if ( $string_in_file =~ /^(\*{4}200[^6].*)$/ ) {
   # Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/* <-
+- HERE
      $delete_candidate = $1;
      s/$delete_candidate//;
   } else {   
   push @data_out, $string_in_file;
   }
}

for $data_out(@data_out) {
   print $data_out;
}

__DATA__
****2000-01-01****test1*****12345*****
****2001-01-01****test1*****12345*****
****2002-01-01****test1*****12345*****
****2003-01-01****test1*****12345*****
****2004-11-19****test1*****12345*****
****2005-07-01****test1*****12345*****
****2006-05-09****test1*****12345*****

[download]

the asterisk appears to me to be properly escaped; AFICT, Mastering Regular Expressions supports that...

So does this occur in other distributions? I doubt AS cares about correcting an older v. unless this is generic... and then only if I haven't contributed an error of my own that explains this.

CAUTION: see bmann below. full error message - to which I should have paid more careful heed - correctly IDed error line thusly: ... at date_elim.pl line 10, <DATA> line 7. <DATA> line 7; not code line 7.
AND see ikegami's re the other badness of the code above... His points are generally well-taken -- esp re my illogic in "throwing away $_" when my intent was to show the other poster that the first regex was a straightforward way to solve his problem.

In reply to regex error puzzle by ww

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