matching a variable containing metacharacter treated as character

docdurdee has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dearest Monks, I have a humble question: How do you match a variable containing a metacharacter that should be treated as a regular boring character? I'm processing some files (@foos) with dots in them. I want:

my @subfoos = grep{m/$var/} @foos;
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I ended up with something awful:

 
my $regvar  = $var; $regsol =~ s/\./___/g;
my @subfoos = map {s/___/\./g; $_} 
              grep{m/$regsol/} 
              map{s/\./___/g; $_}@foos;
}
[download]

is there a better way?

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