If you're using regular expressions, you should not run into any trouble with "special characters" as & , which I'm guessing is the character you're concerned about, is not a regex metacharacter. See perlretut and specifically the section on metacharacters and how to match them in a pattern.

In reply to Re: matching the line which has special characters in it by Errto
in thread matching the line which has special characters in it by greatshots

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