in reply to Grep strings with special characters

To expand on what the Monks above already told you, the reason why your regular expression does not match is because it contains metacharacters, i. e. the characters \ . ^ $ * + ? { } [ ] ( ) |

If you want to match on any of them you need to escape them, i.e. put a backslash in front of each of them, but you can spare yourself the trouble by using the quotemeta function on the regex-string.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom