Is there a way to craft an expression that thwarts quotemeta()? We have an app that takes user data and applies a regex to it but before doing so it does quotemeta to the string. This is expected and desirable but, there are times I'd rather pass some metacharacters for instance I might want to pass a string like this:

\somedir\anotherdir\filename.\d{3}$
[download]

Once quotemeta is done with this it turns it into:

\\somedir\\anotherdir\\filename\.\\d\{3\}\$
[download]

What I'd like is to be able to bypass quotemeta's quoting.

I'd like the string to look like this:

\\somedir\\anotherdir\\filename\.\d{3}$
[download]

I had hoped perhaps \E prior to the desired meta would do the trick but quotemeta just escaped it. I didn't really expect that to work and I suppose it shouldn't but I'd still like to do something.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

TIA

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