Okay, I decided to go the eval route. Because as you pointed out - I'm only using the match operator - which I thought was a regex pattern (I'm really still not clear on the difference.) anyway, I'm also going that route because as another monk pointed out - the use of qr// messes with the user pattern that's already wrapped in //. (the interpolation issue) right now I'm looking at this: 
if($options{c}){
    #variable grab
    my $pattern = eval "qr$options{c}" or die $@;

    print "Please enter the text you wish to run the pattern on: ";
    my $text = <STDIN>;
    chomp $text;
    
        if($text =~ $pattern){
        print $&; #prints entire match
        print " " . $text;
    }
    else{
        print "$pattern on $text Failed. ";
    }
}

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It works, as long as what the user provides doesn't have any spaces in it. (ex: /Bill Clinton/i causes the program to fail, but /BillClinton/i doesn't.) How do I fix that?

In reply to Re^2: qr// and user provided regex patterns... by misterMatt
in thread qr// and user provided regex patterns... by misterMatt

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