A problem with your approach.

Kanji is a multi-byte character set. It is possible for Perl to find a match starting in between the characters you are looking for. With long strings it is not likely, but still it is possible and confusing if you do.

As for Ruby, this book is quite good. And yes, there are morons who like Ruby and hate Perl. But my experience was that the core Ruby people (people like Matz and Dave Thomas) by and large didn't share that attitude.

My personal take on Ruby is that it is an interesting language. I am glad I learned it. I think it is more cleanly structured than Perl, it is more cleanly extensible and I believe that I could more rapidly bring someone up to speed on Ruby than Perl. However it does not have Perl's broad application support, it lacks CPAN, you will have to train people, and I didn't find it compelling enough to recode an existing application base. The single biggest "Uh, oh" for me is that it doesn't have an equivalent to strict.pm.

However learning Ruby made me see and understand certain aspects of Perl better, so even if I never use it, I still think it was a good thing to do.