I need to be able to try and match a short string inputted on a web form against a
longer string that I'm pulling from a database. Normally this would be easy, but the
text string that the web user might enter could contain a parenthesis, and that seems
to be throwing the match off. A simple example:
$web_string = "word(1)";
$db_string = "word(1),word(2),word(3)";
$_ = $db_string;
if (m/$web_string/) {print "match"}
else {print "no match"};
The result of this is "no match" since the parentheses are being evaluated somehow.
If I remove one of the parentheses in one of the strings, I get an error "unmatched ()
in regexp". If I remove all of the parentheses from both strings, I get "match". Is
there a way that I can get grep to consider everything in the strings, including the
parentheses, as simple characters? If I can't, do I need to clean every string before
the match, removing parentheses and any other offending characters? Thanks in advance.
