In that code, $1 won't be set, as you haven't included any capturing groups in your regexp (the only parens you have are escaped to match paren characters): 
$buffer =~ s/varchar \(\d+\)/TEXT/ig if (/varchar \((\d+)\)/i and $1 >
+ 255);

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Update: Typo corrected as per Eimi's post below. Thanks for the correction.

In reply to Re: String replacement with regex... by ishnid
in thread String replacement with regex... by amonotod

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