For doing stuff with these kinds of substitutions, I always use code like this:

use strict;

my %trans = (color => 'red',
         fruit => 'apple',
         name => 'chromatic');

my $string = 'Hi, my name is $name.  Please hand me a $color $fruit.';

$string =~ s/\$(\w+)/$trans{$1}/eg;

print $string;
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<http://www.dave.org.uk>

European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000
<http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>