title: get perl to process backslash escapes in string
body: <p>Consider this code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>my $str = '"line 1\n\t line 2"'; # from some JSON, or something
  say $str; # print literal backslashes, not what I want
  say eval $str; # processes backslashes, but overkill
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a reasonably easy way to get the effect of the last line, but without using full-blown eval?  Even leaving aside the security implications (I mostly trust this string), this interpolates variables and stuff which I don't want.  This can be worked around by an extra preprocessing step where I manually escape dollar signs and such, but this still feels a bit too hacky, even for my tastes.</p>