use strict; my $code; { #slurp mode (http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html) local $/; $code = ; } my $re = qr {\@([a-z][a-z0-9_]*)\[\d+]}; $code =~ s{$re}{ "\@$1\[" . int(rand(99999)) . "]" }eg; print $code; #show output example __DATA__ @a = ("'hello world'",'print ', ';'); eval(@a[1] . @a[0] . @a[2]);