Hi qsl,

Take a look at Split on metachar, substituted text is being interpreted and regex matches with () in strings

Thanks,
Gopal R.

Example usages:

Without quotemeta, the following would not match. It would try (and fail) to match a digit.

$not_a_regexp = '\\d';                            # The 2 chars: \d
$not_a_regexp_quoted = quotemeta($not_a_regexp);  # The 3 chars: \\d
$not_a_regexp =~ /^$not_a_regexp_quoted\z/;       # Matches.
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Without quotemeta, eval would try to execute '''., which is invalid Perl.

$not_code = "'";                          # '
$not_code_quoted = quotemeta($not_code);  # \'
$string = eval "'$not_code'";             # '
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A good general resource: quotes in Perl, alas does not cover quotemeta. perlre covers \Q and \E usage; see also Quote and Quote-like Operators in perlop.

Super Searching for "quotemeta" turns up the following:

• escape all special characters??? - see esp. ikegami's reply for examples
• Matching quoted variables. Cant make it work.. - excellent discussion; once again ikegami's reply really shines

Finally, here is the DBI quote function mentioned by davorg.

HTH,