Re^4: Regex Tool

[a]

Just a point here - something I finally got only after a number of rereadings of the section in J. Friedl's excellent Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly) the /m and /s are a little more complicated.
/m: better remembered as 'multi' mode - affects 'multiple' (2) meta chars, the anchors (^ and $)
/s: 'single' mode - affects one meta char, the dot '.'

/s changes the dot's normal definition - match any char except a new line (\n). In single mode the dot can match \n too which allows regex phrases like:
.*

to match across the end of line. That all it does and so its why the "item.*" in your example matches the end of line.
/m changes the ^ and $ anchors from absolute beginning and end of string to match beginning and end of a line, as marked by new line chars. Which is useful w/ the '/g' option, for example:

local $/ = undef;
my $whole_file = <>; # slurp
while ( $whole_file =~ /^(.*)$/mg ) {
  # process line by line
  print "Got: $1\n";
}

Not a useful snippet but ... two notes - the '\n' on the print stmt and notice the diff if you put an 's' in the match options