Correct. Regexen go through double-quotish interpolation (with a few exceptions, like using single quotes as the delimiters) before being passed on to the regex engine, so you can say stuff like:

my $foo = 'first part';
my $anything = '.*';
my $bar = 'last part';

$_ =~ /$foo$anything$bar/;
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and have it mean the same as:

$_ =~ /first part.*last part/;
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