I agree with the prior replies... I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for... I tried out your code on a fairly simple example and it seems to work fine:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $e = '\\'; # kind of escape char
my $s = '\''; # this is a string to use for splitting
my $str = "this \n contains \\'\n new lines " .
"and single'\nquotes'\n more than\' once";
if( $str =~ m#$/# ) {
$s .= "$/"; # ?? right so?
}
my $re = qr/(?<!\Q$e\E)\Q$s\E/;
my @parts = split $re, $str;
print scalar(@parts), "\n";
for ( my $i = 0 ; $i < @parts ; $i++ ) {
print "$i: $parts[$i]\n";
}
gives the following output:
% ./test.pl
3
0: this
contains \'
new lines and single
1: quotes
2: more than' once
The string was split on '\n, but not \'\n, \n or '.