Question

I have a string,

my $element="abc#$def"

I escape # using,

 $element=~s/#/\\#/g;

It is printed as: abc\#$def, which is perfect.

Next part of the code is:

push(@arr,$element);
foreach $val (@arr)
{
 print $val;
}

And the value printed within the foreach loop is: abc#$def.

Why is # not escaped here? And how can I retain the escaping?

Answer 1

You’re not quite showing us everything. To get your claimed result, I had to create the variable $def initialized as shown below. But, when I do that, I get the result you expect, not the result you show.

$ cat xx.pl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $def = '$def';
my $element = "abc#$def";

$element =~ s/#/\\#/g;

print "$element\n";

my @arr;

push(@arr, $element);
foreach my $val (@arr)
{
    print $val;
    print "\n";
}

$ perl xx.pl
abc\#$def
abc\#$def
$

This was tested with Perl 5.14.1 on MacOS X 10.6.8, but I don’t think the behaviour would vary with any other version of Perl 5.

Given this, can you update your question to show a script similar to mine (in particular, with both use strict; and use warnings;) but which produces the result you show?