in reply to Dear fellow monks, I need help in regex

A quick script you can run from the command line (on unix/linux) might look as follows:

perl -pi.bak -e '$newMeal="food";s/leeming=.*/leeming=$newMeal/' /home +/shaolin/public_html/monkmeals.txt
This will substitute leeming=anything to leeming=food, while creating a backup of the original file as well.

Simply select something else for food, above, and change the file as much as you like.

What might be better would be to use a template system with a database, but the above works for quick one-time replacements.

-v
"Perl. There is no substitute."