$str = q 7Hello, world.7;

whew, I would not want to be in the business of lexing perl

> sed also has something similar:

I also recently learned that one can do the same in the "pattern match" case (not just with `s`) by using a backslash, as in:

  printf 'a/b/c\nd/e/f\n' | sed -ne '\_a/b/c_p'

the man page says "any character" and sure enough, `\ a/b/c p` works also