How can I prevent Perl from interpreting double-backslash as single-backslash character?

Question

How can I print a string (single-quoted) containing double-backslash \\\\ characters as is without making Perl somehow interpolating it to single-slash \\

Answer 1

If you are mildly crazy, and like the idea of using experimental software that mucks about with perl's internals to improve the aesthetics of your code, you can use the Syntax::Keyword::RawQuote module, on CPAN since this morning.

use syntax 'raw_quote';
my $string1 = r'a\\\b';
print $string1; # prints 'a\\\b'

Thanks to @melpomene for the inspiration.