Let's re-phrase the question to: Is there a way that I can test prior to running a progrgam whether or not a regular expression will compile.

The answer is Yes, use the -c flag when invoking perl. You can use: Perl -c myprogram, or you might make the program read in the regex from an external file ... possibly specifying which file on the command line. Then you only have to test the regex file: Perl -c regexfile.