in reply to matching not just words; alternative to (\w+) ?

You can use the POSIX character set graph to do this:

/\A blblbb=([[:graph:]]+)/x

graph matches pretty much anything printable except whitespace. Note that the double square brackets are required.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be
manipulated, and ended up creating an object
system by accident.
-- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated