[PLUG] PCRE is_a_regex?

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

I have a problem with Perl and regular expressions (yeah, I know, now I 
have two problems:).

I need to know whether a variable contains a static string or something 
that is a valid regular expression.  One problem is that a static string 
is also a regular expression but I need to exclude that case, so 
evaluating the results of a qr//; doesn't help.

To make it even more fun, the strings will sometimes contain escaped 
PCRE meta characters or valid literal backslashes, so I can't just m/\\/;

my $regex     = '\ This\sone\s*should\s+flag as a regex \ ';
my $not_regex = '\ This one should not flag as a regex. \ ';


The only idea I have right now would be a nightmare regex using negative 
lookbehinds to try to ID various unescaped PCRE meta characters.  And 
even typing that gives me a headache.

Any clues,
JP
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