I assume that you were not able to match the pattern simply because you did not escape the 'special characters', namely the ":"s and the "|"s.

As far as regexes go, there's nothing special about ":"s. E.g.: 

% perl -wle '$x=q(ab::cd); $x=~s/b::c//; print $x'
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the lowliest monk

In reply to Re^2: Removing a Pattern matched in a Scalar by tlm
in thread Removing a Pattern matched in a Scalar by Anonymous Monk

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