That being said, many useful things are already written more than once. Unfortunately they are often already written more than once in ways which do you little good for your specific problem. The most general and simplest answer to your query seems to be the narrowly named but broadly general Text::EscapeDelimiters which will escape more than delimiters. There is also the corresponding Text::DelimMatch for retrieving delimited text.

String::Escape does what you are asking and more but only in certain narrow cases. Unfortunately, those cases do not include your example specification. You can add escaping methods to it, but then you'd have to write them.

Encode::Escape wraps up several different types of escaping into one module.

URI::Escape works well with URLs and URIs.

Regexp::Common has many tasty treats in its namespace, including Regexp::Common::delimited.

There are domain specific solutions (\Q and \E for regex escaping, Encode for character encoding, HTML::Entities and so on), but a regex is the general answer to the general problem.

sub str2lit {
   my ($s) = @_;
   $s =~ s/([\\',"?])/\\$1/g;
   return $s;
}

sub lit2str{
   my ($s) = @_;
  #$s =~ s/\\([^0-9a-zA-Z])/$1/g;  # Probably better
   $s =~ s/\\([\\',"?])/$1/g;
   return $s;
}
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There is also the quotemeta builtin function, which quotes any non-word character with a \. quotemeta will quote the space character but that doesn't seem to affect printing. An esoteric builtin I learned and only ever saw mentioned... here on perlmonks!

Example:
perl -e "print quotemeta 'yo, what\'s a "henway"?'"

Gives:
yo\,\ what\'s\ a\ henway\?
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uotemeta will quote the space character but that doesn't seem to affect printing
What do you mean by that?

Sorry, you're right. What I meant to say is it doesn't seem to affect matching regular expressions. I'm not sure why I said printing. Then again I should assume quotemeta is safe for regular expressions if it is used by \Q and \E like the docs say! It's late and time for another Pabst!

I trust yours is a hypothetical question.

Each of the members of your set of characters is special at times, but, AFAIK, they are not all special in the same context. Can you clarify the case (context) in which (you think) this might be true?

One might adduce from the first sentence in your question that you believe they're special in a string: That's no so in any circumstance that occurs to me (even though ' and " are used when assigning strings to variables, and thus require escaping if either occurs inside a string quoted with itself.