As moritz suggests, it's likely that recent versions of perl have fixed this problem, but I know from experience with some of the steps between 5.8.0 and 5.8.7 that unicode stuff tends to break the debugger. It's a severe drag: code that works fine just runs, and code that has a problem works fine except for whatever the problem is, so long as you don't run it with "perl -d".

The "\p{...}" operator in the regex is invoking unicode processing, and for reasons I don't understand, it's doing so in a way that is lethal to the debugger. I'm pretty sure the worst of the trouble is gone from 5.8.8, though I'm not sure 5.8.8 solves all the problems. I haven't had a chance to play with 5.8.10 yet.