$text_to_search = \"example text with [foo] and more\"; $search_string = \"[foo]\"; if ($text_to_search =~ m/$search_string/) print \"wee\";
P
You can use quotemeta (\Q \E) if your Perl is version 5.16 or later, but if below you can simply avoid using a regular expression at all.
quotemeta (\Q \E)
For example, by using the index command:
index
if (index($text_to_search, $search_string) > -1) { print "wee"; }