I found a better module on CPAN that does exactly what I need Parse::RandGen::Regexp.pm.

The problem I'm having now is how to get a regexp into this function. I wrote a stub progam to test. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Parse::RandGen::Regexp;

my $regexp = "/^STOR\s[^\n]{100}/smi";
my $r = Parse::RandGen::Regexp->new($regexp);
my $string = $r->pick(match=>1, captures=>{}); 
print("\$string: $string\n");

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This throws the following error. 
Unrecognized escape \s passed through at ./regexp2.pl line 6.
%Error:  Parse::RandGen::Regexp has an element that is not a Regexp re
+ference (ref="")! at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6/Parse/RandGen/Reg
+exp.pm line 36
    Parse::RandGen::Regexp::_newDerived('Parse::RandGen::Regexp=HASH(0
+x9dcdd88)', 'HASH(0x9e5f138)') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8
+.6/Parse/RandGen/Condition.pm line 81
    Parse::RandGen::Condition::new('Parse::RandGen::Regexp', '/^STORs[
+^\x{a}]{100}/smi') called at ./regexp2.pl line 7

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Now I need the string in regexp format to pass to the function. I could just put the string in qr//s but in my real program I need to read the regexps from a list so they will come in scalar format.

i.e. How do I convert: 

"/^STOR\s[^\n]{100}/smi";

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to 
qr/^STOR\s[^\n]{100}/smi

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I'm not sure how to do this conversion.

Thanks,

Paul

Janitored by Arunbear - replaced pre tags with code tags, to prevent distortion of site layout and allow code extraction.

In reply to Parse::RandGen::Regexp by paulski

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