Look at quotemeta, and its twin brother, \Q, in perlre. Like Grandfather said,

$text =~ /\Q$search/
[download]

is indeed one way to use it properly.

Another, more primitive way to achieve the same effect is to precede every \W character with a backslash. That is actually exactly what quotemeta does.

$search =~ s/(\W)/\\$1/g;  # same as:  $search = quotemeta($search);
$text =~ /$search/    # no "\Q" tis time!
[download]