I tested it, it gave me the same output in my previous reply, I will update it to work without an escape character since that conforms more because the ampersand is not considered one of the metacharacters in Perl.

However, I am sure the problem can be somewhere else, just tidy this a little bit and give us your code, more descriptively, and list these error messages, I am sure someone here would get to solve it provided it that you stated your problem in the proper light.