If your string is coming from an external source (read from a file, read from the command line, STDIN, a database field) you shouldn't need to worry about escaping \ * ?, f.e.:


qt.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;use warnings;

my $string = $ARGV[0];
my $test = $string;
my @illegal = qw(\ * ?);
my @legal = qw(bs a q);
my $c = 0;
foreach my $val (@illegal) {
    $test =~ s/\Q$val\E/[$legal[$c]]/g;
    $c++;
}
print $test."\n";
[download]

$ perl ./qt.pl 'a\\b\\c\d\\\\e'
a[bs][bs]b[bs][bs]c[bs]d[bs][bs][bs][bs]e
$ perl ./qt.pl 'foo*bar\eleven?three'
foo[a]bar[bs]eleven[q]three
$
[download]

the reason you needed to escape \ * ? is that you were entering the assignment in perl, and perl was doing the interpolation. This won't happen in a already assigned string.

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