Fellow monks, I beseech your wisdom....

I've got a file that contains strings that look like this: ITEM-####, which I would like to transform into something I can use to make Perl check against like items in our database, for example: ITEM-1234.

I thought I might achieve this with something simple like

my $string = qw(ITEM-####);
$string =~ s/#/\d/g;
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but to no avail. Instead I got a warning: "Unrecognized escape \d passed through."

So then I tried escaping the escape, like so:

my $string = qw(ITEM-####);
$string =~ s/#/\\d/g;
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But that makes my string look like this: ITEM-\\d\\d\\d\\d, which isn't what I'm looking for.

My last idea was to use qw...

my $esc = qw(\d);
my $string = qw(ITEM-####);
$string =~ s/#/$esc/g;
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But that also got expanded to include two back slashes: ITEM-\\d\\d\\d\\d.

So now I'm stumped. Is there any way I can do this? Li'l help?

Update: FunkyMonk is right, my code does work. I was looking at it in the debugger, and apparently the debugger itself was adding the extra backslash. Thank you both.