O.K. Perl Monks, Lets say I have a file called myfilename.html that looks like this:

<!-- This is an example file -->
<p>this is a link to a book called<br>
<a href="http://www.foobar.tv/booklink.html">
<hr>etc etc

[download]

I wrote a small script that tells me which lines match a certain sting I enter on input, as in:
#>perl filematch.pl book

$matchtext = shift;

$page = "myfilename.html";    
open  PAGE,  $page;
@page_text = <PAGE>;
close PAGE;

    foreach $page_line (@page_text) {
        if ($page_line =~ m/$matchtext/) {
            print "There was an instance of $matchtext\n"; 
            print "on this line:\n";
            print "$page_line\n";
        }
    }

[download]

The code above will tell me there is a match when $matchtext = "book", but it won't match when $matchtext = "booklink". I thought that even though, in my file, "booklink" is surrounded by non-whitespace, it should match nonetheless...

Anybody know what's wrong?

In reply to Simple REG/EX Question by mr_dont

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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