My comment about "deleting the right angle bracket" was not about the escape codes, which always use a single left-square bracket after the ascii "esc" character, because... well, whoever thought it up must have felt it was a good idea at the time.

I was pointing out that your regex substitution went like this:

  s/(^.*<)\:([a-z]+)>/$1$hash{$2}/;
[download]

Note that you are keeping the left-angle bracket ("<") as part of the first capture ($1), but you are not keeping the associated right-angle bracket (">") -- that one is being deleted, because it's part of the matched pattern, but not part of the replacement string.

If that's what you want, fine. I just thought it looked a bit like a bug.