Turns out, this would be great if I were just doing a test - but I'm actually doing a substitution:

$_ =~ s/input/input value=\"$fields{$key}\"/i;
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What I'm doing is creating a way for them to edit their data - so using the \Q \E makes things hard for the end user - I'm sure they'll freak out when they are faced with a field that looks like: Job\ Announcement\ for\ March... (you get the picture.)

I realize that the eval() idea is probably the best bet.