The easy way is of course to use a DFA matcher.

For example, with flex:

$ cat hl.l
%option noyywrap
%%
\\F\\   putchar('|');
\\S\\   putchar('^');
\\T\\   putchar('&');
\\R\\   putchar('~');
\\E\\   putchar('\\');
$ flex hl.l && gcc -lfl -O lex.yy.c -o hl
$ ./hl
AB\T\F\S\CD
AB&F^CD
$
[download]

There must be lots of DFA regexp packages available for perl on CPAN.