That's not a regex, that's a string. And the \'s aren't making a lot of sense. And that string used as a regex wouldn't match anything in your string. So I'm not entirely sure what you're trying. A code sample would be appreciated.

  my $str = 'speed basic-2.0 basic-11.0';
  my ($one_basic) = $str =~ /speed\s*(\S+)/;
  my @all_basics = $str =~ /\s+(\S+)/g;
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Just guessing, though.