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Perl Programming/Keywords/quotemeta
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Perl qr qw Keywords
The quotemeta keyword
The quotemeta command returns the value of EXPRESSION such that all the ASCII non-"word" characters (that do not match with [A-Za-z_0-9]) are backslashed. This is the internal function implementing the \Q escape in double-quoted strings. If EXPRESSION is not passed, the function uses $_ instead.
Syntax
quotemeta EXPRESSION
Examples
The code
my $sentence = 'The quick brown fox jumpes over and over again.';
my $substring = 'quick.*?fox';
my $quoted_substring = quotemeta($substring);
$sentence =~ s{$quoted_substring}{big bad wolf};
print '"', $sentence, "\"\n\"", $substring, "\"\n\"", $quoted_substring, "\"\n"; returns the following: "The quick brown fox jumpes over and over again."
"quick.*?fox"
"quick\.\*\?fox"
Perl qr qw Keywords