perl programming???

while (<IN2>)
{
if ($_ =~ /xml version/)
{
print $Count++, " ", $_;
print OUT $_;
}
else
{
exit
}

I have this above program where the $_ searh for the "xml version". But I wanted it to change and look for <?xml version="1.0" the problem is it gives out an error when searching for <?xml version="1.0". Please help???

the question mark is a reserved wildcard repetition signal for regular expressions. Right now it is telling to look for either 0 or 1 of the less than (<) symbol, then look for xml... it doesnt look for the question mark. you need to escape it. Perhaps you will need to escape the quotation marks as well? I'm not sure off the top of my head if it will give you an error as well. Start with the question mark for sure:

($_ =~ /<\?xml version="1.0"/)