I'm not sure I've figured out what you are trying to say.

I don't particularly care that Perl doesn't mind the space after the sigil; it is still a horrid place to insert a space (humans read code too).

And between the two characters of =~ is excluded by the \b or its translation into my elaboration of roughly \W\w|\w\W.

If those weren't your points or you had other points, feel free to reply with the English and code separated so they don't obfuscate each other. (: