Surely all these replies that fix one example out of an infinite number of possible user inputs are missing the point?

If I understood the original post, $NetPattern is to be read from the command line, so the example, mistaken bracketing and all, was just an example. The question was

If a user enters a command-line regular expression that gets pushed into a variable, what is the most reliable way to use that variable to compare it against another variable that is a string?

In our answers, we should be explaining how to validate a user-supplied string before interpolating it into a regex. A simple error like [ without matching ] is the least of our worries.

In reply to Re^2: Comparing two variables when one variable includes a regexp... by Narveson
in thread Comparing two variables when one variable includes a regexp... by fiddler42

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