The problem is that you're not escaping the meta-character pipe(|) which alternates sequences in regex (see. perlre for more info on regexes). Also you're using the string comparision operator and not the regex matching operator =~ (see. perlop for more info on operators in perl) to match on $array[1]. To get your example to work you could do something like this

if($array[1] =~ m{ /:swiss \| \w+ \| \w+ }x) {
    ...
}
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And if you wanted to do this match on an array of strings you could do something like this

my $match_re = qr{ ^ /:swiss \| \w+ \| \w+ }x;
foreach my $line (@array_of_strings) {
    if($line =~ /$match_re/) {
        ...
    }
}
[download]

HTH

_________
broquaint