Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/* <-- HER
+E */ at gn gxsmig_mapextver0.1.pl
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That error message means exactly what it says. There is a quantifier (in your case *) that follows nothing, that means it is at the start of the regular expression. A regular expression cannot start with *, ? or +.

My guess is that $mappingfield starts with *. Maybe you want to read perlre and use the \Q and \E escapes to properly quote $mappingfield for use in a regular expression:

    if ($line2 =~ /\Q$mappingfield\E/) { ...
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Thanks for that info.Your reply was the solution to that problem

It means that the regex in the pattern match is not well formed. It happens to be /$mappingfield/, so it's hard to tell without seeing what's in $mappingfield. Wild guess, but I may well be wrong: you may want /\Q$mappingfield/. But then also look at index.

BTW: use <code> tags to format code in your posts.

If means that your $mappingfield variable contains a value with the regex quantifier metacharacter '*' at the beginning - infact it appears that the variable only contains '**'. This is the same form of message you get if you do:

 perl -e'$foo='babab'; $foo =~ /*aba*/'
Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/* <-- HER
+E aba*/ at -e line 1.
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/J\

In a regex a quantifier determines how many times something may match. There has to be a something however. A simple example is that x* matches any number of x's (including 0). It is the x that is being matched. The * say how many times it is allowed to match.

In your sample the m/ bit introduces a regular expression match. The * is an orphaned quanifier - it has nothing to count. Most likely what you want in that case is m/.* to match any number of anything. However .* at the start of a regex match is generally redundant and can be omitted.