You're close. First of all you need to escape the '@' so it doesn't get interpreted. Secondly \s matches whitespace, not any character, \w is probably what you're looking for as it matches [A-Za-z0-9_]. And finally you need to end your regex with a /.

Now even though you don't say it, it appears you're trying to match an email address, there are better ways to do it (check CPAN, I'm not certain of a specific module). But even your regex above can match on invalid addresses. Let me know if you're doing email and I'll show you a quick and dirty regex that can get most of them (though even its not perfect).