no one mentioned it yet, so here goes -- to avoid escaping the / in the regex, use s### (or similar) instead of s/// .. just adds one more tidbit of legibility. A trivial example:

my $s = "<foo>stuff</foo>";
#$s =~ s/<foo>(.*?)<\/foo>/<bar>$1<\/bar>/;
$s  =~ s#<foo>(.*?)</foo>#<bar>$1</bar>#;
print $s;
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