There is a real good reason why there is an option for changing the delimiter in pattern substitution. Witness the following code I used to alter URLS that needed to appear in a text field in a flatfile database: 
while(<>){ #take input from STDIN

        s/\/\//\\\/\\\//g;

    print STDOUT;

    }

[download]
Why? Because the designers of this flatfile database decreed that "//" would be interpreted as the beginning of a comment, thus causing everything after "http://" to be lost. So I escaped those particular forward slashes using s///; It looks atrocious, but it did the job.

Using an alternate delimiter wouldn't eliminate the need for all the forward and back slashes, but at least it would show me (or another trying to decipher the above atrocity) where the expression was delimited.

-----
"Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt"

In reply to Re: quite weird regexp by cadfael
in thread quite weird regexp by larsen

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