The reason taking the quotemeta out fixed the problem is that a quotemeta-ed string that contained  \W characters will, in general (there may be some oddball corner cases), not regex-match with itself after the string has been double-quote-ishly interpolated into a regex. The reason is that after a string is quotemeta-ed, something like  '\-' in the quotemeta-ed string is literally a backslash-hyphen sequence of characters, but this sequence in a regex only matches a hyphen leaving the backslash in the quotemeta-ed string unmatched.

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s    = 'a-b c*d';
 my $qm_s = quotemeta $s;
 print qq{raw: '$s'  quotemeta-ed: '$qm_s'};
 ;;
 printf qq{%s equal \n}, $qm_s eq  $qm_s  ? '' : 'NOT ';
 printf qq{%s match \n}, $qm_s =~ /$qm_s/ ? '' : 'NO ';
"
raw: 'a-b c*d'  quotemeta-ed: 'a\-b\ c\*d'
 equal
NO  match
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