I'm struggling with a tricky quoting problem: I need to split lines divided by some delimiter; - The delimiter usually will be '|', but can be changed, so it needs to be variable. - Furthermore, the columns may also contain the delimiter, in which case it is quoted by a backslash No problem, as long as I know the delimiter in advance: my $split_rx= qr[(?<!\\)\|]; my (@cols)= split $split_rx, $line; But with the delimiter contained in a variable, no matter what I try, I just can't get an equivalent regex: my $delimiter='|'; $split_rx= qr[(?<!\\)\$delimiter]; # the '$' is quoted, so the variable won't be expanded; $split_rx= qr[(?<!\\)\\$delimiter]; # now the backslash is is quoted instead I also tried variations using quotemeta or the 'x' modifier, but I just don't get it right :-( Any ideas? Regards, PeterThread Next