Regexen are not indigenous to Perl - they're simply a very good tool for solving a subset of the problems which programmers regularly face, such as your own. Regex implementations are available for most most common languages, including JavaScript, Visual Basic, Java, and C/C++. Avoiding them because they're too Perlish makes about as much sense as avoiding map and grep because they're too Lispish. In other words, it makes no sense at all.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print