In a script, I read pairs of strings in a config file and store them in a hash. Subsequently I loop through lines of text, searching for the hash keys and replacing with the corresponding values (ie, $text =~ s/$key/$val/).

The strings I am dealing with can contain metacharacters, such as parentheses, periods, etc., as well as non-ASCII characters. In these cases, my s/// doesn't work.

I was hoping to find a way to programmatically sanitize these strings for use as regexes, so that metacharacters are escaped and non-ASCII characters are properly dealt with.

I have searched but found no solution. Can someone point me in the right direction? TIA.

In reply to Sanitizing strings as regexes by carenas2

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