It looks like you have metacharacters in $key (*, right?) that you want interpreted literally. You cannot escape the entire scalar with a single \, you are only escaping the dollar sign -/\$key/ will match the string '$key'.

If you quote $key with /\Q$key\E/, that should give you what you want.

For more info, try perldoc perlre.

In reply to Re: Matching a variable in a fixed width file by jsprat
in thread Matching a variable in a fixed width file by aseidas

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