special chars as scalar inside regex

I've got a problem I think there may be a straight-forward solution to  
that I just don't know.  I have a program that reads a variable-length  
input file. And the field delimiter of that file is given as an  
argument.  The problem is something like pipe "|" might show up as the  
delimiter.  So is there a way to quote/protect that in the split()  
function without it being interpreted as a regex special character?

Something like:

./myprog.pl "|"

myprog.pl:
---------
my $delimiter = $ARGV[0];
my @fields = split(/$delimiter/, $line);


This is a very simplified example.  Hope that makes sense.

• special chars as scalar inside regex by Rob Benton
• Re: special chars as scalar inside regex by John W. Krahn
• Re: special chars as scalar inside regex by Gunnar Hjalmarsson