Well...

for string values and regexes you've got the q qq qw  qx qr tr m and s constructs and 'anonymous' m q and qq ( // ' " ): see the perlop manpage

the all the 'letter' constructs can use ANY character as a delimiter, which can be escaped inside the literal using a backslash. Also, if the starting delimiter is an opening brace-like character: [ < { { the string will be closed with the corresponding closing brace.

The s and tr operators can use different quoting characters for the two parts of the expression (i.e. s(ab)!cd! )

Inside a ' or " quoted string you can escape the quotes with a backslash.

Also there are HERE documents: 

my $string =<<ENDSTRING;
bla bla 
bla bla
ENDSTRING

[download]
that end when the delimiter is found at the beginning of a line the delimiter may be the empty string, ending the string on the first paragraph.

Furthermore there are =pod directives and __DATA__ / __END__ sections you probably want to leave alone.

As they say: "only perl can parse perl", but it doesn't make it easy, only possible :-)

As for existing beautifiers, you can also take a look at B::Deparse (but perltidy is a lot more useful for this sort of stuff) 

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.

[download]

In reply to Quoting constructs (was: Re: Beautifier) by Joost
in thread Perl code Beautifier? by Jaap

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