In general, Perl doesn't care if the string you're doing matches over contains funny characters or not - and it doesn't care if the string you're searching for contains such characters.

As the previous poster said, if you can write out the values in the \xNN\ notation, you're all set.

There is no concept of lines in regexp per se, but if you will be using the "." wildcard, it is better if you put the s qualifier at the end of the search - that way, . will match any newlines that might be in the code, and ^ and $ will match the beginning and the end of the string - rather than a "pretend" newline that happens to be somewhere in the string.