Okay I've checked previous similar questions and I've been juggling with different variations of quotemeta but something's still not right.

I have a line with a word ID and two words - the first is the wrong word, the second is right. And I'm using a regex to replace the wrong word with the right one.

$line = "ANN20021015_0104_XML_16_21 A$xAS   A$xASA";
@splits = split("\t",$line);
$wrong_word = quotemeta $splits[1];
$right_word = quotemeta $splits[2];
print $right_word."\n";
print $wrong_word."\n";

$line =~ s/$wrong_word\t/$right_word\t/g;

print $line;

What's wrong with what I'm doing?

Edit

The problem is that I'm unable to retain the complete words - they get chopped off at the special characters. This code works perfectly fine for words without special characters.

The output I need for the above example is:

ANN20021015_0104_XML_16_21      A$xASA   A$xASA

But what I get is

ANN20021015_0104_XML_16_21      A   A

Because of the $ character.