what exactly do you need to escape? (I can never get this straight)

[Steve Grazzini]

Steve <me@home.com> wrote:

> As the topic says, what exactly do you need to escape? I can
> never get this straight. For instance, I see this line of code
> when reading through the newsgroups:
>
> unlink glob "$jukebox[$i]/$date/*" or die "Cannot unlink files: $!";
>
> but I am always escaping the forward slash as \/.

You never *need* to escape slash. The only time you might want
to escape it is inside a quote-like operator that has used it for
the quote-character:

next if /$jukebox[$i]\/$date/;

But instead of escaping it there, you'll usually just pick a
different quote-character.

next if m|$jukebox[$i]/$date|;

To answer the more general question:

The list of what counts as a metacharacter and where is in the
"Quote and Quote-like Operators" section of perlop.

% perldoc perlop
% perldoc -f quotemeta

--
Steve

[Steve]

Hi all,

As the topic says, what exactly do you need to escape? I can never get
this straight. For instance, I see this line of code when reading
through the newsgroups:

unlink glob "$jukebox[$i]/$date/*" or die "Cannot unlink files: $!";

but I am always escaping the forward slash as \/.

Thanks in advance,

Steve

[Steve]

Hey, thanks Steve for the info!