Doh, I have to stop posting on Saturdays. You can pull my chain, but sometimes I don't light up. :-) On the topic though, instead of quoting, it may work by using the same variable identifier to end the variable.... it would eliminate all confusion and allow "any" characters like tab, newlines, line returns, etc. It would make obfuscated code very easy.

my $var    with spaces and  \t   tabs$ = 1;
my @arr  ay@ = ();
my %ha          
sh%= ();
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Maybe I should stop posting on Sundays too. :-)