hm, we seem to be talking about different things

I thought we were talking about using strings obtained from an external source (such as a file or DB) as a regex, and whether the (?{...}) feature could be exploited in that case. The example you gave of concatting two halves of a regex still requires the code to be literal in the source (albeit split) to not need 'use re eval' in the src code, even prior to 5.18.0.

Dave.