Controlling REGEX in Perl?

[Jeremy]

That'd work mate... but it's a bit of a long way round - especially if you don't quite know what you're going to find in the data you're analysing.

EG, when I've analysed link descriptions, I've run into problems where descriptions have things like: "?" or "+" or even ":-)" smilies have caused the script to grind to a halt..... so it needs to be flexible enough to deal with whatever gets thrown it's way.

I'm sure that the answer's staring me in the face in PERLOP, but I'll be buggered if I can spot it!