Hello Grimy,

This is a nice idea, but unfortunately, as long as the regex contains metacharacters, it can’t be made to work, because $1 will never contain those metacharacters:

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump;

my $re  = 'aaa\s+bbb';
my %dic = ($re => 'new');
my $s   = 'aaa   bbb';

$s =~ s/($re)/$dic{$1}/;

print "\$1   = $1\n";
print "\$s   = $s\n";
print "\%dic = ";
dd     \%dic;
[download]

Output:

19:34 >perl 1011_SoPW.pl
Use of uninitialized value within %dic in substitution iterator at 101
+1_SoPW.pl line 10.
$1   = aaa   bbb
$s   =
%dic = { "aaa\\s+bbb" => "new" }

19:34 >
[download]

Sorry, :-(