G'day live4tech,

I see you've resolved your problem. There can be rare instances when you want to preserve all the input, including terminal newlines. In these cases, you can use \Z (uppercase) instead of the more usual \z (lowercase).

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
    while (<>) {
        say "z-match" if /\A\d+[a-z]+\z/;
        say "Z-match" if /\A\d+[a-z]+\Z/;
    }
'
123dog
Z-match
[download]

Details are in: perlre - Regular Expressions under Assertions.