This does the transformation you asked for but I'm not sure it meets your readability requirement. Certainly not the way I'd parse tokens out of a string.

$string="glarch capri foobar";
$r=q/Capri|Classic/;

$string=~m/($r)/i;
$r=~m/($1)/i;

print $1;

...
Returns 'Capri'
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