Hi, I made an error in the second example I showed above (pointed out to me by ++Laurent_R). I'll correct it in my earlier post. I committed the copy-pasta sin :-(

When you compile a regexp using qr{} and then print it as a string, you get the output you showed here:

$ perl -wE 'my $x = qr{ foo }; say $x'
(?^u: foo )
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But again, that was only output in your program because I had string and match reversed in my example.

say can be enabled with -E on the command line for one-liners, or with use feature 'say'; or use 5.010; in your program. It requires Perl 5.10 or newer.