It's not necessary. 

>perl -e"$_='a'; print qr/$_{3}/"
(?-xism:a{3})

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And beyond being unnecessary, it will never help either. If you were to do ${_}{...} to prevent $_{...} from beint treated as a hash element, it still wouldn't do what you want. See Re: Of scalars, hashes, quantifiers, and regexen.

In reply to Re^3: More efficient way to truncate long strings of the same character by ikegami
in thread More efficient way to truncate long strings of the same character by kurtis

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