G'day ovedpo15,

I see others have shown you how to access the captured text.

"I came a cross with the Term::ANSIColor module which can help me color the string without writing the color codes myself."

I wasn't sure if you were asking for help using Term::ANSIColor. In case you were, here's a demo. I do recall that I found the documentation difficult to follow when I first used it. By the way, it's a core module: no need to install it.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Term::ANSIColor;

my $path = '/a/b/c/d';
my $re = qr{^/a/b/([^/]*)/([^\/]*)};
my $demo_fmt = '%-28s : ';

printf $demo_fmt, 'Input  - plain text from OP';
print "$path\n";

if (my @matches = $path =~ /$re/) {
    my $debug_path = $path;

    for (reverse 1 .. $#-) {
        substr $debug_path, $-[$_], $+[$_] - $-[$_],
                colored($matches[$_ - 1], 'red');
    }

    printf $demo_fmt, 'Output - "c" & "d" are red';
    print "$debug_path\n";

    printf $demo_fmt, 'Output - internals of string';
    use Data::Dump;
    dd $debug_path;
}
[download]

Prints:

Input  - plain text from OP  : /a/b/c/d
Output - "c" & "d" are red   : /a/b/c/d
Output - internals of string : "/a/b/\e[31mc\e[0m/\e[31md\e[0m"
[download]