Metacharacter in Perl

Metacharacter	Default Behaviour
\	Quote next character
^	Match beginning-of-string
.	Match any character except newline
$	Match end-of-string
|	Alternation
()	Grouping and save subpattern
[ ]	Character class

Metacharacters serve specific purposes in a pattern. If any of these metacharacters are to be embedded in the pattern literally, you should quote them by prefixing it by "\", similar to the idea of escaping in double-quoted string. In fact, the pattern in between the forward slashes are treated as a double-quoted string.

Example :

The above code "(" braces gives an error, so in order to escape this parenthesis, we are using the forward slashes, it is similar for using the double quotes.