http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=525794

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

Hi Monks!

Please, I need some enlightment about a regex error...

Why am I getting these errors ? I thought \Q and \E where valid escapes for regexen :-(
Unrecognized escape \Q passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE +in m/\b\Q <-- HERE Renata\E\b/ at -e line 1. Unrecognized escape \E passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE +in m/\b\QRenata\E <-- HERE \b/ at -e line 1.
The $regexp is retrieved from a DB, and came from an user (the interface appended \Q...\E before storing it in the DB) The offending code snippet is this:
# ... print STDERR "/$regexp/\n"; $throw_away = ($window =~ /$regexp/ism) ? 'TRUE' : 'FALSE'; # ...
And the "STDERR" output before the error is:
/\b\QRenata\E\b/

Thanks in Advance :-)


Update:Maybe I wasn't clear about a point: the regexes come from a DB, and in DB they already had \b...\b, and now some (few) of them have \b\Q...\E\b there. Is isn't my script that is messing with them...

last update:Thanks ikegami-san (who explained the point about \Q...\E in interpolations), and others who helped. I'm accepting more suggestions, but for now, as the regexes are "simple" (whatever that means :-)), I'll go with quotemeta()'ing whatever is inside \Q...\E (the text in question has no "\" so I wont fall in the \\Quux trap :-))

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