> I offer up a solution using a guard.

I think you are a little too concerned about the redirection thing. I know it looks weird (at least it did the first time for me) but it's well documented in the perldocs.

Direct hooks into the regex-engine OTOH would be nice...

> "online analyzers which are easily fooled".

many online solutions think PCRE means PCRE...

> It'll at least take care of the tokenizing for you.

actually there more levels of tracing-info which use re qw/Debug .../ may supply. (I still have to dig into perlreguts to understand it completely)

I like the fact that Perl does the hard thing for me ... and I have this nagging feeling that only Perl can parse Perl... ;-)

One may trust into specifications, but regarding Perl I think direct control is better. ¹

At second thought translating to other engines is a very ambitious task, I think I should start with a simple beautifier which translates "line-noise" to a '/x'-option multiline expression.

Ok YAPE::Regex::Explain could possibly be patched for this.

¹) kind of quoting a big administrator ;-)