How can I match a pipe character followed by whitespace and another pipe?

Question

I am trying to find all matches in a string that begins with | |.

I have tried: if ($line =~ m/^\\\\\\|\\s\\\\\\|/) which didn\'t work. <

Answer 1

If it's a literal string you're searching for, you don't need a regular expression.

my $search_for = '| |';
my $search_in = whatever();
if ( substr( $search_in, 0, length $search_for ) eq $search_for ) {
    print "found '$search_for' at start of string.\n";
}

Or it might be clearer to do this:

my $search_for = '| |';
my $search_in = whatever();
if ( 0 == index( $search_in, $search_for ) ) {
    print "found '$search_for' at start of string.\n";
}

You might also want to look at quotemeta when you want to use a literal in a regexp.