Just for your interest:

Multiple ^ or $ anchors would be legal.
The /m modifier in combination with the /s modifier would match the intended behaviour.
/m: match over multiple lines
/s: . matches everything (even newlines)

Note that you would have to insert code to match any newline either by . or by \s. See example below. 

my $text = <<"END";
a sample line
item
duhduh
 foo
END

$text =~ /^item.*(^duhduh$)\s*foo$/sm;
print "\$1: '$1'\n"; # prints "$1: 'duhduh'"

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In reply to Re^3: Regex Tool by Dietz
in thread Regex Tool by Yunus

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