And perhaps I'm overstepping the purpose of perlmonks.org? I'm looking for an interesting discussion of ways and means rather than a single solution to a pending problem. Perhaps that is not what perlmonks.org is for, and if I am out of line, I will stop posting these questions.

You are not overstepping the purpose of perlmonks.org. That Perl Monks is a very different place to Stack Overflow is indicated by this classic quote from Perl Monks pioneer tye:

Most languages are like stackoverflow: I have a question, I want the best answer. Perl is like PerlMonks: I have a doubt, I want to read an interesting discussion about it that is likely to go on a tangent. q-:

To improve your regex, as noted by Discipulus here, I suggest you check out every node written by tybalt89 ... oh, and given it provides a "single regular expression that defines a set of independent subpatterns suitable for matching entire Perl documents", you might also enjoy studying PPR, written by TheDamian.

👁️🍾👍🦟