Hi All,
As it turned out what I originally thought was the problem wasn't at all, and instead it was a simple mistake in a foreach loop. So I thought best to re-title this thread and turn it into an explanation encase anyone else makes the same mistake. My original post is at the bottom of this thread.

I'd cobbled together a simple template system that involved a hash and a regexp (should have used HTML::Template instead).

foreach my $key (%HASH) {
    $html =~ s/<!--$key-->/$HASH{$key}/gis;
}#foreach
print $html;
[download]

Easy I thought... Worked great at first, but suddenly I started getting errors such as:-
Unmatched ) in regex; marked by <-- HERE in..."
?? I though regexp only checked for matching brackets in the first part, which in this case is the $key which would only contain predefined things such as 'name', 'email', etc.

I posted here to find out why I was getting this error with a quick example. To my horror my example of the problem didn't have any problems... As it turned out I'd made a really simple mistake, lots of you have probably already noticed it:-

foreach my $key (%HASH) {
[download]

Should be:-

foreach my $key (keys %HASH) {
[download]

None of the keys had any brackets in, but the values did. Without specifying 'keys' I was getting both keys and values in $key. Rookie mistake, but after 9yrs still bit me on the ass.


Lyle



---Original Message follows---


  I'm having a little trouble with a quick regexp I put together. Basically users can input text that gets put into a web page. The text is swapped in with a simple regexp:-

my $userinput = 'Some text';
$html =~ s/<!--usertext-->/$userinput/is;
[download]

Now this works fine most of the time, until the user decides to input something like a smiley, such as:-

my $userinput = 'Some text :)';
$html =~ s/<!--usertext-->/$userinput/is;
[download]

Results in the error "Unmatched ) in regex; marked by <-- HERE in...". I don't quite understand why this is happening as I only thought brackets did something in the first part of the regexp.

Would very much appreciate any help as to what I am doing wrong.


Lyle


Update: I've just checked my examples on the command prompt and they worked for me as well. I'm looking closer as to why this is happening and I'll update you.