\Q or quotemeta is indeed what you needed.

But your problem is not connected with hardcoded regexes vs. regexes in variables. As Samy_rio correctly pointed out, the problem comes from the fact that '.' has a special meaning in a regex which you don't want in your case. Therefore you need to escape it: either by putting a '\' in front of it - which works fine for the hardcoded case an is a bit more complicated for variables OR you use quotemeta resp. \Q which works in both cases.

-- Hofmator

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In reply to Re^2: Regex Start Anchor with variables by Hofmator
in thread Regex Start Anchor with variables by chrism01

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