I am not sure if it would be faster or not, but you could always store each of the match terms as keys in a hash and do something like this.

my %hash = qw(
       $bar => 1
       $baz => 1
       $boo => 1
);
print "yep!\n" if exists $hash{$foo};
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HTH

-Prime

Update: I tested the code and it is considerably faster. The first benchmark time is the regex solution and the second benchmark time is using a hash. Both tests were run 100,000 times.

Regex Solution
timethis 100000: 18 wallclock secs ( 0.41 usr +  0.05 sys =  0.45 CPU)

Hash Solution
timethis 100000:  1 wallclock secs ( 1.58 usr +  0.00 sys =  1.58 CPU)
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