Hi All, I have files that have some special markers in them something like this:
<5b>I <5c>like <5d>tacos
I was wondering if there was anyway possible to make the regex engine ignore these tags without deleting them? For example, if I had a regex like this:

s/(\w+)\s+tacos/$1 yummy tacos/g;
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I would want it to change the above phrase to:
<5b>I <5c>like yummy <5d>tacos
I realize I could change the regex to:

s/(\w+)\s+(<\w\w>)?tacos/$1 yummy $2tacos/g;
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but my script requires quite a few complicated regexes substitutions and having optional "(<\w\w>)?"s everywhere will make the regexes very ugly and make it hard to keep track of which capturing parenthesis are catching what.
I was wondering if there was a way to make the regex engine see the a string something like this where it would do its matching just against the first element in each sub array:

$string = [
  ['I','<5b>'],
  [' '],
  ['l','<5c>'],
  ['i'],
  ['k'],
  ['e'],
  [' '],
  ['t','<5d>'],
  ['a'],
  ['c'],
  ['o'],
  ['s']
]
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Another possibilty I have considered and tried was erasing all the tags and then after I was done with all the substitutions doing a diff and trying to reconstruct where the tags should go. This actually works but was way too slow.