Fedora :: Inserting To Escape Single Quote For Mysql Insert?

the project I'm working on requires parsing a text file with fields separated by the | char and using perl to insert/update a mysql database. Some of the fields are simple numeric and others are text fields. In some of the text fields I run into a problem creating a proper insert statement for the perl api to mysql if I don't escape the single quote (') char with a backslash (). I can take each text file and do a manual subsitutiton, but I would prefer to use the script that prepares the text file to do it for me. I've tried sed (ex: sed s/'/\'/g ) and it runs cleanly, but does nothing to accomplish my goal. I suppose I could write a function to read the file character by character and write it out that way, but it seems a waste.