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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