Yes, regex handling in Perl is the smoothest I have ever seen, and it matched the first description I heard of perl as "the best tool for text processing". I have done big things with that.

Those $ variables are dynamic scoped! If you call a method and it matches stuff you lose the variables!

My match scopes typically looked like so:

if ($inString =~ /^([ \t]+)(.*)$/) {
    my $indent = $1;    # store first match
    my $remainder = $2; # store second match
    
    # do stuff
}

(not tested, just edited by hand to anonymise)