It's simpler than that: The quantifier cannot be variable.
This must mean something other than what it seems (to me) to mean: 
$ perl -E 'my $quant = 2; "ab" =~ /.{$quant}/ and say "Matched"'
Matched

[download]
shows that the ‘length’ of the quantifier can be given by a variable.

In reply to Re^2: Regex fun by JadeNB
in thread Regex fun by Hena

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