Another possibility is to treat the replacement as an expression and single quote it: s/#4/'Blah hash $288'/gie Notice the additional regex modifier 'e' on the end. It should work and might be more understandable (you judge). Good luck, Troy >>> Thomas Eibner <thomas at stderr.net> 06/20/01 03:50AM >>> On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 03:46:31AM -0500, Bob Tanner wrote: > Quoting Thomas Eibner (thomas at stderr.net): > > On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 03:26:52AM -0500, Bob Tanner wrote: > > > Quoting Bob Tanner (tanner at real-time.com): > > > > s/#4/Blah hash $288/gi > > > I guess a better question what is a quick and easy was to escape all > > > meta-characters in a string? > > > Like, if I want to escape * ? $ > quotemeta EXPR >$ perl >$test = quotemeta '*?$-'; >print $test, "\n";^D >\*\?\$\-