Dear Ted, thank you for answering so quickly.
The problem is, I don't want to make the users write regular expressions. Of course, I have to test them with the help of 'eval' in order to prevent that an illegal regular expression is blocking the whole cgi-application. The reason for not using regular expressions is that my search application is meant for searching patterns in a bilingual text (German and Russion), which is displayed in cyrillic and with German umlauts. And it would be a lot easier if I could just search for sun moon AND NOT suns moons So, I appreciate all ideas. Peter ----------------------------------- Zitat von [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > perlfaq6: (cut-n-paste to get the final "-" there) > http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perlfaq6.html#How-do-I-match-a-pattern-that-is-supplied-by-the-user- > > How do I match a pattern that is supplied by the user? > Well, if it's really a pattern, then just use > > chomp($pattern = <STDIN>); > if ($line =~ /$pattern/) { } > > Alternatively, since you have no guarantee that your user entered a valid > regular expression, trap the exception this way: > > if (eval { $line =~ /$pattern/ }) { } > [...] > Good luck, > .ted -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]