In these simple cases better prefer simple approaches!

Constructing regexes as concatenations of strings or qrs is simple and clear!

But if you really need to "abuse" the full builtin regex power, you may wanna have a look at  "(?PARNO)" "(?-PARNO)" "(?+PARNO)" "(?R)" "(?0)" in perlre!

This functionality was introduced for complicated recursions ...

You can also try to dynamically generate the regex with embedded perlcode like (?{..}) or (??{..}). to achieve even more obfuscation... ;-)

Update: example

  DB<1> $_=q(somename   1000  0.24  280  2 2576.9  2731.9  12.0  4195.
+3)
 
  DB<2> $,=" | "
 
  DB<3> print /(^[a-z]\w*)(\s+[.\d]+)((?2))((?2))((?2))((?2))((?2))((?
+2))((?2))/
somename |    1000 |   0.24 |   280 |   2 |  2576.9 |   2731.9 |   12.
+0 |   4195.3
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