character is also treated as a metacharacter introducing a comment,
just as in ordinary Perl code. This also means that if you want real
whitespace or C<#> characters in the pattern (outside a character
-class, where they are unaffected by C</x>), that you'll either have to
-escape them (using blackslashes or C<\Q \E>) or encode them using octal
-or hex escapes. Taken together, these features go a long way towards
-making Perl's regular expressions more readable. Note that you have to
-be careful not to include the pattern delimiter in the comment--perl has
-no way of knowing you did not intend to close the pattern early. See
-the C-comment deletion code in L<perlop>. Also note that anything inside
+class, where they are unaffected by C</x>), that you'll either have to
+escape them (using backslashes or C<\Q \E>) or encode them using octal
+or hex escapes. Taken together, these features go a long way towards
+making Perl's regular expressions more readable. Note that you have to
+be careful not to include the pattern delimiter in the comment--perl has
+no way of knowing you did not intend to close the pattern early. See
+the C-comment deletion code in L<perlop>. Also note that anything inside
a C<\Q...\E> stays unaffected by C</x>.
X</x>