Esteemed Sibling Grinder:

Here you write "Good thing you pointed out that this code is untested, because it is wrong!" ....

Thank you for your correction. At first I doubted you and the saint who's words you invoked.

The correct regular expression is:
 /\A\.{1,2}\z/ My regular expression was:

 /^\.{1,2}$/

<code> perldoc perlre
[download]

reads in part:
...The \A and \Z are just like ``^'' and ``$'', except that they won't match multiple times when the /m modifier is used, while ``^'' and ``$'' will match at every internal line boundary. ...

Since there is no /m modifier in the picture I doubted you....

However,  perldoc perlre continues:
To match the actual end of the string and not ignore an optional trailing newline, use \z.

As soon as I noticed that /z and /Z are as different as a and A, I realized you were correct.

Of course you are also correct about using  eq