Hello everyone,

This should be straight forward but I am stuck and I have not find a solution to my minor problem. I have written a small script to convert mp4 to mp3 files and I am getting stuck when files contain single quote.

I know that I could use quotemeta but it escapes more characters that what I need. I only need to escape the specific character '.

Sample of code and what I have tried:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';

my $string = "This sting it's bothering to escape ' single characters"
+;
$string =~s/(\W)/\\$1/g;
say $string;

__END__

$ perl test.pl 
This\ sting\ it\'s\ bothering\ to\ escape\ \'\ single\ characters
[download]

I also found this relevant question Escaping single quote in $string. Unfortunately all proposed solutions remove the quote and I want to keep it.

Any hint is appreciated.