perl function quotemeta

The quotemeta function in Perl returns a string with all non-alphanumeric characters escaped. This can be useful for using user input as a regular expression without interpreting any special characters in the input.

Here's an example:

my $input = "Hello, world! [foo]";
my $escaped = quotemeta($input);

print $escaped . "\n";

Output:

Hello,\ world\!\ \[foo\]

In the above example, the $input variable contains a string with non-alphanumeric characters such as commas, spaces, exclamation marks, and square brackets. The quotemeta function is used to escape these characters, so that they can be used as literals in a regular expression. The resulting string is stored in the $escaped variable and printed to the console.