$person = "Sarah"; $greeting = "Hello, $person";will cause $greeting to have the value Hello, Sarah. If one wanted to have a literal $ sign within the string, the $ sign must be escaped:
$count = 33; $message = "At this point, \$count is $count";will result in $message being At this point, $count is 33.
At times, one might want to have literal quotes within a string. These also must be escaped, in order to indicate to Perl that the literal quotes are not the ending quotes of the string:
$quotation = "Bob said \"Hello\"";will result in $quotation being set to Bob said "Hello". Such escaping can become tricky - to help in the readability, Perl offers an alternative quoting mechanism:
$quotation = qq{Bob said "Hello"};
for which the " character need not be escaped.
The qq syntax can actually use any pair
of brackets, such as qq[] or qq().