How to write regex for special characters without using back slashes??

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

Hi perl monks...

Please suggest me how to search and substitute for word with special characters without using back slashes..

my @nets = "in1_[0], in1_[1]";
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since variable nets contains auto generated words, sometimes it may contain simple words without any special variables as follows

my @nets = "a_c, b_c, N_05";
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lets say my file has in1_[0] word at many lines of codes and i wrote a perl script to search for in1_[0] i.e. $nets[0] word and replace it with in1_1 word i.e. $nets1...

while (<DATA>){
print "substitution is done" if (s/$nets[0]/$nets[1]/);
}
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But, while executing the script i understood that special characters [] are present in variable nets, hence this substitution regex statement is not working... i read that i have to use back slashes for those characters... since nets file will be auto generated and sometimes only it may contain array values, how can i generalize this regex script accordingly...

-DATA-
in1_c[0]
in1_c[1]
in1_c[0]
in1_c[1]
a_c
in1_c[0]
b_c
in1_c[1]
in1_c[0]
in1_c[1]
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