Perl Tk Canvas - Is it possible to escape characters in tag expressions?

I have a Tk Canvas which I'm using to display electrical relay circuits. As part of updating the Canvas, I use itemcget() to get the current state of some objects in the Canvas. For example:

$CW->itemcget("COIL$name", '-fill')

The issue is that when displaying certain circuits, I get the following error and the canvas stops updating:

=== 20092 === Tk::Error: Invalid boolean operator in tag search expression at C:\Strawberry\perl\site\lib/Tk.pm line 251.

The offending tag is something like "COIL[!AB*CD[F]]Zyx123". Tk interprets the '!' as a logical NOT, which makes this an invalid expression. Removing the '!' from $name in the itemcget() call stops the error, but has the obvious downside that it can no longer find the right tag. I couldn't find any documented way to escape characters in a tag expression, so I tried adding a backslash before the '!', which didn't work. Neither did adding a second '!'.

Is there any way to escape the '!' in the tag expression, or am I going to have to re-work the code so that tag names never contain these characters?

EDIT: I ended up going with a third option. I wrote a function that searches every object in a Canvas for one with a matching tag, bypassing the tag expression problem.

sub canvas_tag_search
{
    my ($CW, $search_tag) = @_;
    
    foreach my $object ($CW->find('all'))
    {
        foreach my $tag ($CW->gettags($object))
        {
            if ($tag eq $search_tag)
            {
                return $object;
            }
        }
    }
    
    return undef;  # No match found
}

This solution doesn't address my original question, but it will work for my purposes.