Is your regexp exceptionally intricate and detailed, and your code is a cut-down example, or are you really just trying to match anything (dot).

If it's the latter case, then a regexp is not the right way to go about solving the problem. Better to:

  my $len = length $value;
  if ($len < $min or $len > $max) {
    panic();
  }
  else {
    ok();
  }
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Internally, perl keeps track of string length at all times, so calling length is a very cheap operation, whereas it is quite possible that the regexp engine has to scan through the whole string to satisfy the curly.