Hello, I am having a regex-related problem...

Basically, I want to include regex input and string literals in the same expression, without having metacharacters in the string interpreted as regex metacharacters. The code to do this looks like this...

s/ $STRING $PATTERN /$REPLACEMENT/gx

# where <i>STRING</i> and <i>PATTERN</i> are user-defined
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With that in mind, I was wondering if it is possible to do one of the following:

1) Is there a module for escaping regex characters in a string?
2) Is there an extension mechanism inside the syntax that allows a literal string to be included?

Thank you for any help you can provide.