Question

In perl suppose I have a string like 'hello\tworld\n', and what I want is:

'hello  world
'

That is, “hello”, then a literal tab character, then “world”, then a literal newline. Or equivalently, "hello\tworld\n" (note the double quotes).

In other words, is there a function for taking a string with escape sequences and returning an equivalent string with all the escape sequences interpolated? I don’t want to interpolate variables or anything else, just escape sequences like \x, where x is a letter.

Answer 1

Sounds like a problem that someone else would have solved already. I’ve never used the module, but it looks useful:

use String::Escape qw(unbackslash);
my $s = unbackslash('hello\tworld\n');