I don't know for sure where you are going with this, but the code as you have it won't work. as you are missing the tilde after the $line= in both your conditionals. Anyhow I think this is what you meant:

 
my $line='0x160001a \"fubar - BlahBlahBlah - Blah Blah (1:23)\": ("Foo
+" "Bar")  Baz';
if ($line=~/\)/){
   $line="$`)"; 
}
if ($line=~/-\s/){
   $line=$';
}
[download]

But as anything else you can always set the values of $' and $` to a variable and use those variables later on:

use strict;
use warnings;
my ($prematch,$postmatch);
my $line='0x160001a \"fubar - BlahBlahBlah - Blah Blah (1:23)\": ("Foo
+" "Bar")  Baz';
if ($line=~/\)/){$line="$`)"; $prematch = $`;}
if ($line=~/-\s/){$line=$'; $postmatch = $';}

print $prematch,$/;
print $postmatch,$/;
print $line,$/;
[download]

And you can use both $' and $` after you get a successful match in the current dynamic scope (as long as you are still in the current dynamic scope). Though I would probably solve the problem differently than you are doing by the same reasoning as you above.

Here comes my simple question: since the first - occurs before the values that I want, and because the first ) occurs afterwards,

use strict;
use warnings;

my $line='0x160001a \"fubar - BlahBlahBlah - Blah Blah (1:23)\": ("Foo
+" "Bar")  Baz';

if ( $line =~ /- ([^\)]+\))/ ) {  print $1; $line = $1;}
[download]

which captures in $1 what you described, and doesn't suffer from the performance penalty of using $' or $`

-enlil

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