See now I have tried your first solution but all I get is the following error: 

WARNING:  nonstandard use of escape in a string literal
LINE 3:                         AND branch ~ '$root\.\d...
                                             ^
HINT:  Use the escape string syntax for escapes, e.g., E'\r\n'..
Which is confusing me a little :-)

In reply to Re^2: Perl and PostgreSQL regex by chrishowe
in thread Perl and PostgreSQL regex by chrishowe

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