Perl5 Internal Representation of string variable

[flexvault]

Dear Monks,

I was helped and learned from the answers to my post Substitution, '+' in first position of Pattern. But, after thinking about the requirement for quotemeta or \Q, I realize I must have a 'grave' misunderstanding about how perl keeps variables internally. Most of my scripts work on files, and I have tested that all 256 (0-255) possible byte values are available (Why I love perl).

So my question is:

Are all string variables internally represented by backslashing non-alphanumeric characters or are there internally different types of string variables?

Thank you

Note: I searched for this first, but I got too much information about utf8.