I've got what might be a naive question - but here goes: I am working on a web-based database system, and am working hard to make sure that any entries into the database are going to work - not create errors. At this point, I've taken care of all of the DB entry errors - wrong type, etc. There is one problem left: One of the things I'm doing is passing some of the data through a regex for a test. If the data in the field has some characters (like a square bracket) the script will barf (saying stuff like "unmatched brackets in regex"), and cause an ungraceful error. It's going to be quite unusual that someone does this, but I want to take care of any situation. So - what's the best way to go about this? I thought about escaping particular characters on the way in, using tr like: 
$val =~ tr/\[/\\\[/g;

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etc. But this seems really clunky. Other suggestions? I guess my general question is how do I exit gracefully from perl errors caused by data input?

In reply to How to gracefully deal with a regex problem by michellem

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