Regular expressions may seem awkward at first, but keep at it! Your efforts will pay off in the long run. Perl is a far more powerful language for having them, and you'll be able to do many more things, easier, for being able to use them.

The Camel (Programming Perl, Wall/Christiansen/Orwant) has a good chapter on Pattern Matching; you can also use 'perldoc perlre' to get an overview. Neither one is probably ideal for a total regexp newbie, however. I learned RE syntax from years of using sed, awk, and vi, so I can't recommend any specific introductory books (although many exist).

-dave

Did your use line look like this?

use Regexp::Common

Note the double colon -- not the slash you used in your note.

...and did your error end with a line like this?

BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at 40.pl line 3.

I mention the first because the first thing that occurs to me is that you tried to

use Regexp/Common;

If you used the correct form (as in the first sample above), then IMO, the problem is likely that Regexp::Common is not installed.