quotemeta

Synopsis

my $safe = quotemeta($string);
$string =~ /\Q$pattern\E/;     # \Q invokes quotemeta

Description

Escapes all non-“word” characters with a preceding backslash.

Returns a version of the string where every non-word character ([^A-Za-z0-9_]) is preceded by \. Useful for interpolating literal strings into regular expressions. If all characters are already word characters, the input is returned unchanged with no allocation.

See also

m//, s///