title: Why is the @ symbol escaped in this Perl regular expression?
body: <p>I'm currently covering Perls RegExps and on the whole understand it I think. Escaping characters I have also grasped I think, ie testing for a backslash, denoteable by m/\/ in that the backslash needs to be proceeded buy the \ character first to tell perl in this instance to search for it as apposed to it's usual meaning.</p>
  
  <p>What I don't understand with the code below I have is, this pattern match and why (\) is used when testing the email address with @ symbold (in the if statement expression). I'm not aware @ is a special character needing escaping or have I missed something?.</p>
  
  <pre><code>#!/usr/bin/perl
  
  EMAIL:
  {
  print("Please enter your email address: ");
  $email = &lt;STDIN&gt;;
    if ($email !~ /\@/)
    {
      print("Invalid email address.\n");
      redo EMAIL;
    }
    else
    {
      print("That could be a valid email address.");
    }
  }
  </code></pre>