Well, what I said was that

m/.{$width}/
[download]

could be better written with substr, and still be readable. I have seen from replies to my post that unpack is better yet. I just made the $text =~ /\.txt$/ regex example up as I was writing the post, so it my not be the best, but the point I wanted to get at is if you don't need to match the whole string, then don't. For example:

$text =~ m/.*$endPat$/
[download]

can be better written (and still readable) as:

$text =~ m/$endPat$/
[download]

And as you have pointed out, the above code can be written this way (much less readable, I wouldn't recomend using this)

substr($text,0-length($endPat)) eq $endPat
[download]

On a last note, I never said it was a mistake not to use subst(), I just wanted to point out that in some cases it is better than using a regular expression.

The 15 year old, freshman programmer,
Stephen Rawls