You're misunderstanding what regular expressions do. What they do is detect whether a string satisfies the regular expression's criteria for a match. They don't morph one pattern into another through the magic of quantifiers. You might want the s/// operator: 

my $what = 'ram';
$what =~ s/(\Q$what\E)/$1$1$1/;
print "$what\n";

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Dave

In reply to Re: simple regular expression printing by davido
in thread simple regular expression printing by gaurav

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