I have the following code which finds duplicates in 2 text files and spits out the duplicates into 3 seperate files. Its great, except that I now want it to ignore special characters such as brackets, commas, apostophes, quotes etc. How do I amend the code to ignore those types of characters but still report duplicates? 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#use strict;

sub slurp{ local *ARGV; @ARGV = @_; <> }

my %where;

$file1 = "c:\\gpTemp\\chris\\validation\\brookdeliv\.txt";
$file2 = "c:\\gpTemp\\chris\\validation\\LD\.txt";

$both = "c:\\gpTemp\\chris\\validation\\ld\\Acts_delivered\.txt";
$infile1 = "c:\\gpTemp\\chris\\validation\\ld\\Acts_Missing\.txt";
$infile2 = "c:\\gpTemp\\chris\\validation\\ld\\Acts_Extra\.txt";

open BOTH, "> $both" or die "Cannot open $new for writing: $!";
open INFILE1, "> $infile1" or die "Cannot open $new for writing: $!";
open INFILE2, "> $infile2" or die "Cannot open $new for writing: $!";


$where{$_} .= "1" for slurp($file1);
$where{$_} .= "2" for slurp($file2);

for (sort keys %where) {
  my $where = $where{$_};

  if ($where =~ /12/) {
  print BOTH;

  } elsif ($where =~ /1/) {

  print INFILE1;

  } else {

  print INFILE2;

  }

  print ":\t$_";

}

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In reply to Finding duplicates in a text file by ilottl

Title:
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