in reply to Store regular expressions in a file.

this 'data' is a regular expression

No, it is not a regular expression, only the duck is a regular expression. s is a Perl operator. If you can it would be a lot easier to have two columns, the first being the RE pattern ('duck') and the second being the replacement text ('luck') and then read them into variables (using split) - it is perfectly valid (and common) to store an RE in a Perl variable.

Otherwise you will be reduced to doing nasty things like eval, and you don't want to go there.

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Re^2: Store regular expressions in a file.
by yoda54 (Monk) on Nov 11, 2010 at 11:22 UTC
    So something like this? I don't get any output.

    Thanks 

    
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $data = "duck";
my $r;
while(<DATA>) {
   chomp;
   my ($x, $y) = split(/\s/, $_);
   
   $r->{$x} = qr/$y/;

   if ($data =~ $r->{"duck"}) {
      print "$data\n";
   }
}

__DATA__
duck s/duck/luck/

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