I find '-Dr' far more useful than 'YAPE::Regex::Explain'. The latter just parrots back what it was given, but then in English. '-Dr' shows how perl compiles it. As shown in the thread 'YAPE::Regex::Explain' doesn't notice the overlap between \S and \W, not even that '*' is mentioned twice. '-Dr' shows what's really going on, although the output is sometimes hard to grog.

And '-Dr' really shines at runtime, showing how Perl actually matches a regexp.

Abigail