Hello CropCircle, and welcome to the Monastery!

This line:

my $var2 = $var =~ /red|green|blue/;
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looks a bit strange to me. If $var contains 'xredy', for example, the match will succeed but $var2 will be set to 1 (“true”):

22:35 >perl -wE "my $var = 'xredy'; my $var2 = $var =~ /red|green|blue
+/; say qq[|$var2|];"
|1|

22:35 >
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Is that really what you want? To set $var2 to the string that was matched, you need something like this:

22:25 >perl -wE "my $var = 'xredy'; my ($var2) = $var =~ /(red|green|b
+lue)/; say qq[|$var2|];"
|red|

22:30 >
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The parentheses within the regex are for capturing, and the parentheses around $var put the match into list context. See perlretut#Extracting-matches. Or you can get the capture in $1:

22:38 >perl -wE "my $var = 'xredy'; $var =~ /(red|green|blue)/; my $va
+r2 = $1; say qq[|$var2|];"
|red|

22:38 >
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Hope that helps,