This search string _isn't_ a regexp, however.  It's just straight text
that may or may not exist within a certain document.  If it were a regexp,
I'd just do a while(<FILE>) {/$searchstring/ && $found=1;} kind of thing,
but that wont' work, because the user might unwittingly write a regexp
when he means not to.  For instance, he might be searching for a _literal_
period, not using a period as a wildcard as the above construction would.

So what's the solution?  What do I do?  I have this nagging feeling that
there's some real obvious answer, but for some reason I'm just stumped.

Thanks in advance, cc's to email appreciated.

In perl 5, there's a new function, quotemeta, and a new RE character,
\Q, specifically for this - i.e. you can match on /\Q$searchstring/.
This allows the user to put \E in the string to countermand the quoting.
Construe this as a feature :-)

In earlier versions of perl, you'll need to do $searchstring =~ s/\W/\\$&/g

Ian

        $searchstring = 'foo\E(*+)bar';
        print "\Q$searchstring\E\n";

perl prints:

        foo\\E\(\*\+\)bar

, as it should.

--
Hope this helps,

HansM

I wrote some PERL code a while go along these lines.
In it, I would let the user choose whether the input pattern
was to be treated as a regex, an exact match and whether the
output records should have the matched pattern show as bold.
Here is the relevant code:

        # quote metachars if this is not a regular expression
        $patt =~ s/(\W)/\\$1/g if (!$in{'regex'});
        # anchor search item if exact match
        $patt = '^' . "$patt" . '$' if ($in{'exact'});
        # check regular expression syntax
        eval "/\$patt/";


                Make sure to specify a correct
                <A HREF=\"http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/info/info/perl.info,Regular%20Exp...">
                PERL regular expression</A><BR>");
            # exits
        }
        while(<FILE>) {
            if (/($patt)/) {
                # bold match if requested
                s/($1)/<B>\1<\/B>/g if ($in{'bold'});
                # write out matched line
                &PrintHTML($_);
            }
        }

Hope this helps.

- Alberto

============
Alberto Accomazzi                       Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~alberto     Cambridge, MA  02138  USA

|> If it were a regexp, I'd just do a
|>   while(<FILE>) {/$searchstring/ && $found=1;}
|> kind of thing, but that wont' work, because the user might
|> unwittingly write a regexp when he means not to.

while(<FILE>) {
    $found=1, $last if index($_, $searchstring) >= 0;

        while(<FILE>) {
                if(/$searchstring/o) {
                        $found = 1;
                        last;
                }
        }

Or, if you insist on cramming everything on a single line:

        /$searchstring/o && ($found = 1) && close FILE while <FILE>;

You can't "last" out of a postfix-while loop, but closing the file has
pretty much the same effect.

--
Hope this helps,

HansM