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 backslashes or C<\Q \E>) or encode them using octal
+class, where they are unaffected by C</x>), then 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