It doesn't mean what you think it means

[Fletch]

in reply to Compiling regular expressions to perform substitution

qr// only compiles regular expressions, not substitution operators. What you've done is compiled a regular expression for matching `s/foo/bar/g'. You can use compiled regexen on the left hand side of an s/// expression, but you can't use one to capture the whole expression.

Now if what you're trying to do is capture an operation or three to be performed on a string that you can select programattically, you possibly could use a hash of coderef like this:

my %mungers = (
            foo => sub { $_[0] =~ s/foo/bar/g },
                fru => sub { $_[0] =~ s/(fru.*)/uc($1)/e },
              );

if( $phase_of_moon > WAXING_GIBBOUS ) {
  $mungers->{foo}->( $string );
} else {
  $mungers->{fru}->( $string );
}

Update: Feh, as was pointed out that first -> inside the if/else blocks is extraneous. That's what I get for posting while trying to eat breakfast.

[Stegalex]

Slight modification needed to make this compile. Here it is:

my %mungers = (
            foo => sub { $_[0] =~ s/foo/bar/g },
                fru => sub { $_[0] =~ s/(fru.*)/uc($1)/e },
              );

if( $phase_of_moon > WAXING_GIBBOUS ) {
  $mungers{foo}->( $string );  # this line changed
} else {
  $mungers{fru}->( $string );  # this line changed
}

Again, thanks for everyone's help. I like chicken.