match with symbol

Selvakumar has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am having problem with the below code. Both are equal but if "+" symbol appears then it's not find correctly. how can i solve this?

$var='/Sample + Design';
$var1='/Sample + Design';
if (($var1=~/$var/))
{
print "Yes";
}
[download]

Comment on match with symbol Download Code

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Re: match with symbol by Corion (Patriarch) on Jul 22, 2009 at 07:53 UTC
This is because `+` is special in regular expressions, see perlre. You want quotemeta respectively \Q...\E.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: match with symbol by JavaFan (Canon) on Jul 22, 2009 at 09:11 UTC
Or Corion points out, one way is to use `\Q` and `\E`. Another is to realize that if you want an exact match, there's no need to use the regexp engine. `if (index($var, $var1) >= 0) { print "Yes"; }` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: match with symbol by chomzee (Beadle) on Jul 22, 2009 at 09:13 UTC
Did you mean: `print "yes\n" if ($var1 eq $var);` [download] ? Your regexp doesn't match because '+' has a special meaning there. You should use: `$var='/Sample \+ Design';` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: match with symbol by Anonymous Monk on Jul 22, 2009 at 12:33 UTC
Hey as said earlier in patternmatch the special character has different meaning, so we need to put backslash infront of those chars. $var = '/Sample + Design'; $var1 = '\/Sample \+ Design'; if($var =~/$var1/) { print "yes \n"; } else{ print " No \n"; } Thanks claiming	[reply]