That's because \t is a regex metacharacter. If you only want to escape some metacharacters, you'll need to figure out which ones.

If you want to escape all metacharacters beside backslash, something like:

  s/([^A-Za-z_0-9\\])/\\$1/g;
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If the delimiter will always be one character then you can assume anything longer than 1 character is a escape sequence like "\t". So you just call quotemeta() on delimiters with a length of 1.

HTH

Tedrek

That's one I haven't thought of. I try that out. The delimiter should never be more than 1 character.

Thanks!