Question

I need to match large strings with the fields of a column in mysqlDB. something like

%ERROR-kkl_ub{}: (from YAMios): Destination (name = sdasdays.s0sda.rindasdth.sbo98.sbssdao_sad) is not registered.

it contains a lot of special characters, i cannot try and do a \ for each of them as there will be hundreds of unique signatures.

need help…

Answer 1

In perl, us literal quotes, with single quote characters, or the q operator, which was designed for quoting literal strings which may have the normal quote characters often. q (and qq for interpolated strings) allows for the next character to be the bounding quote character (similar to the m and s regular expression operators).

my $var1 = 'this is a "literal" string';
my $var2 = "this is an \"interpolated\" string";
my $var3 = q/this is a "literal" 'string'/;
my $var4 = q{another literal string};
my $var5 = qq/interpolated string, previous one was '$var2'/;

If you are worried about getting the strings into SQL queries (I admit I found your wording slightly confusing), use bound variables.

my $dbh = DBI->connect( ... );
my $sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = ? OR string_field = ?');
my $rv = $sth->execute(1425, $var5);

See the DBI perldoc for more info.