Gentle mwhiting

It would help to know more about what you are going to do with this string when you have it. You can leave the + $ ^ characters in place and protect them with \Q:

  my $foo = 'a\b*c/d';
  my $bar = '  A\B*C/D  ';
  $bar =~ / ^ \s+ \Q $foo \E \s+ $/xi
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will evaluate true.

But if you really want to, know that it is 'safe' to backslash all the punctuation characters, so

  s/([^\w\s])/\\$1/g
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should do what you want. More specifically, backslashing alphanumeric characters makes them 'meta', but only alphanumeric characters become 'meta' when backslashed. So even though you don't need to backslash '#', it will match the same even after it's backslashed.

throop