Hm, took me a while, even though you have a very nice hint in the second example. I instinctively rewrote it to if ($any_string =~ /['"]${b}['"]/), but it took me much longer to notice/grok that the same thing was happening in the third and fourth examples. (perhaps it is too early?)... Yep, another example of how exciting Perl's string interpolation can be.