What you're probably seeing is the greedy behavior of dot-star. .* will match as much as it possibly can, so in your example, it should match "blue] blue [/color] word. And a [color=red] red [/color", not "blue". You could change your regular expression to one of the following options:

# non-greedy dot-star
@colors = $new =~ m/(\[color=.*?\])/gi;

# say what you mean: match non-] characters
@colors = $new =~ m/(\[color=[^\]]*\])/gi;
[download]

-- Mike

--
just,my${.02}