How to escape dollar sign ($) in a string using perl regex

Question

I'm trying to escape several special characters in a given string using perl regex. It works fine for all characters except for the dollar sign. I tried the following:

my %special_characters;
$special_characters{"_"} = "\\_";
$special_characters{"$"} = "\\$";
$special_characters{"{"} = "\\{";
$special_characters{"}"} = "\\}";
$special_characters{"#"} = "\\#";
$special_characters{"%"} = "\\%";
$special_characters{"&"} = "\\&";

my $string = '$foobar';
foreach my $char (keys %special_characters) {
  $string =~ s/$char/$special_characters{$char}/g;
}
print $string;

Answer 1

Try this:

my %special_characters;
$special_characters{"_"} = "\\_";
$special_characters{"\\\$"} = "\\\$";
$special_characters{"{"} = "\\{";
$special_characters{"}"} = "\\}";
$special_characters{"#"} = "\\#";
$special_characters{"%"} = "\\%";
$special_characters{"&"} = "\\&";

Looks weird, right? Your regex needs to look as follows:

s/\$/\$/g

In the first part of the regex, "$" needs to be escaped, because it's a special regex character denoting the end of the string.

The second part of the regex is considered as a "normal" string, where "$" doesn't have a special meaning. Therefore the backslash is a real backslash whereas in the first part it's used to escape the dollar sign.

Furthermore in the variable definition you need to escape the backslash as well as the dollar sign, because both of them have special meaning in double-quoted strings.