Wiz,

I tried your code and I am either missing something or it does not work as advertised. See my following code...

my @foo = qw(JohnSmith Smiccky aaaaaa);

foreach my $f (@foo) {
    print "Yep $f \n" if ($f =~ /^[qw(Smith Jones)]/);
}
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The result I get is ..

Yep JohnSmith 
Yep Smiccky
[download]

Which is quite obviously not an "in" relationship. If I add a "JJJJJ" entry to the list, that one will match as well. So it seems that you are still creating a set of individual characters, not something larger.