# the manual way, hunting over the keyboard, and worrying about
# possibly escaping certain specials (truncated example)
@s = qw(! @ # $ % ^ & *);

# investigation of the ASCII table shows the special characters are
# in chunks, which we can convert into the real characters using map
@s = map { chr } 33..47,58..64,91..96,123..126;

# this can also be done without knowing where the special characters
# are with a grep for printable non-alphanumeric non-whitespace chars
@s = grep { /[[:print:]]/ and /[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/ } map { chr } 1..128;