Adding to
liz' (completely correct) comment: The parens are RegEx metacharachters used for grouping and capturing. For example,
$string = 'Hi there (Mark)'; m/^<[^>]+>$string<\/[^>]+>$/; would be exactly the same as
m/^<[^>]+>Hi there (Mark)<\/[^>]+>$/;, which matches "Hi there Mark" between tags and captures the "Mark" part of it.
quotemeta(...) and its RegEx equivalent
m/\Q...\E/ (
quote ...
end) escape all the RegEx metacharachters properly (i.e.
(Mark) to
\(Mark\)).
And that's about it.
Hope this helped.
CombatSquirrel.