You're misunderstanding what regular expressions do. What they do is detect whether a string satisfies the regular expression's criteria for a match. They don't morph one pattern into another through the magic of quantifiers. You might want the s/// operator:

my $what = 'ram';
$what =~ s/(\Q$what\E)/$1$1$1/;
print "$what\n";
[download]

Thanks Dave

Have a look at perlretut:

What is a regular expression? A regular expression is simply a string that describes a pattern. [...] In Perl, the patterns described by regular expressions are used to search strings, extract desired parts of strings, and to do search and replace operations.

To have this expression operate on $what, you would need to write it $what =~ /($what){3}/;. But even then, it won't match, because it would try to match the contents of $what 3 times. In this case, you would be better off with the x operator. You probably also want to print a newline at the end:

use 5.012;
use warnings;
my $what = 'ram' x 3;
print $what, "\n";
[download]

Or even...

use 5.012;
use warnings;
say 'what' x 3;
[download]

Your code should always use warnings;, and usestrict; or use5.012; (or later), which automatically enables 'strict'. You might usediagnostics as well. All of these will help you understand and avoid many errors.

As an additional comment to what has already been said, don't use bare words like this:

But rather use this:

or:

Thanks Laurent..I will keep this thing in mind