I'd like to add: \Q and \E are a way of telling perl, within quoted text, to protect against meta characters. This is done internally by the quotemeta function. Meta characters are characters with meaning, normally beyond the seven bit ascii range.

What \Q and \E, or quotemeta do is simply add a backslash before every character which can have a special meaning.

An example of where this is needed is the at (@) character - it can mean an array, or just '@'. Regexes are very fragile in this sense, because many characters have a meaning.

-nuffin
zz zZ Z Z #!perl