I'm also wondering why you are appending to $LookFor. If it is previously empty and you are using that as the pattern to match, that code should work. You probably don't want to append to it, just set it. Using qr// should help eliminate the escaping you've needed to do. And in that second regex, you can A) use \w which is a shortcut for the character class you've specified and B) eliminate the non-greedy matching as it doesn't help you because you've anchored your match anyway.

if ( $srch_host ) { 
    $LookFor = qr/^$srch_host$/;
} else { 
    $LookFor = qr/^\w+$/; 
}
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-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";