I have a question about running SED commands. I have a list of simple commands that I wand to run that look like this: 
$trans =~ s/$item/$newitem/g;

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and where the $item and $newitem elements are key-value pairs from a hash. What I have works fine for most characters, but I run into trouble with special characters like $ % &. I tried building an array of specials and including an 'if' statement to deal with the exceptions, such that the new code looks like this: 
if( grep( $_ =~ $item, @special ) ) {
   $trans =~ s/\$item/$newitem/g;
} else {
   $trans =~ s/$item/$newitem/g;
}

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But it still doesn't work, the escape character just seems to negate the '$' in $item. Any suggestions? Joe

20040407 Edit by BazB: Changed title from 'SED commands in Perl'

In reply to Performing substitutions on lines with special characters by wouldbewarrior

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