Parsing escape characters in @ARGV

[Marijn]

Hello,

This is my first post to this forum, because until now Perl has been one of the most convenient and intuitive programming languages I know. However, now I have an issue that I cannot resolve. I want to pass a string as a command line argument, and (for the purposes of this question) print the string. This works fine, except for the fact that escape characters are not parsed.

The code:

$output1 = $ARGV[0];
$output2 = "line 1\nline 2";
 
print $output1;
print "\n";
print $output2;
 

The call:

perl lines.pl "line 1\nline 2"
 

The output:

line 1\nline 2
line 1
line 2
 

I'm running Perl 5.10.0 on the Command Prompt of WinXP.

Does anyone know how to parse the escape characters in @ARGV? Thanks in advance.