If your second variable is always 3 characters and the first is always at least three characters, then it's not too hard, you could see if a substring of var1 eq var2. Or even the following works for me

if ($var1 =~ /^$var2/) {
  print "matched";
}
[download]

Or you could do character by character comparisons. I'm sure in this case there are many ways to do it, though it would get complicated if you wanted to do a compare where $var1 used periods and $var2 used underscores or something.

UPDATE: 20070522 11:01 localtime > ++ to BrowserUK for index

UPDATE: 20070522 11:57 localtime > got a pm (thought it was a reply) and can't remember who sent it now, but props to the monk in question for reminding me to anchor the regex with ^