Is it possible through a regular expression or some function to escape the characters after \ into the corresponding special characters?

Question

Perl

The user enters a string containing non-escaped special characters (i.e. the string will contain substrings '\n', '\t', etc.)
I need to replace these substrings with the corresponding special characters, i.e. "\n", "\ t", etc.
Is there any function to do this? Or any one regex that implements this?
So far, I have in my mind only for each character to prescribe the corresponding regular expression, but this is a bug :( Like
this:

$1 =~ s/\\t/\t/gs;
$1 =~ s/\\n/\n/gs;
...