I think I understand what you are trying to do although your question wasn't clear to me at the outset.

First, this /ee stuff is messy and I read this post StackOverflow re: variable in replacement side which talks about some of the details.
Then I came across: String::Substitution module.
I figured that this module does exactly what you want, so I installed and tested it.

use strict;
use warnings;
use String::Substitution qw(gsub_copy);

my $in_string = 'foo.ra';
my $find_exp  = '\.(.)(.)$';
my $replace_exp = 'b$2$1s';

my $output = gsub_copy($in_string, $find_exp, $replace_exp);
print "$output\n";  # prints: foobars

[download]
You can read thru the docs and see more options.

In reply to Re: sprintf using variables for format and variables to do a search and replace, sprintf issues by Marshall
in thread sprintf using variables for format and variables to do a search and replace, sprintf issues by kevins4perl

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