Let's call this a mini-meditation.

One lamented aspect of Perl is that regexes get really hard to read. That's why we end up writing =~ m#http://\w+[.]\w{2,3}/[^ ]+# with #'s instead of /'s.

But since # does have a meaning in Perl, and in fact occurs frequently — why not use a sigil §, gnaborretni ⸘, or the tetragram for ease 𝌜? These are all possible with the pragma use utf8;. Then that regex looks like:

=~ m𝌜http://\w+[.]\w{2,3}/[^ ]+𝌜

I find this a bit easier to read. Maybe you will too.