Introducing join.

my @titles = qw/ Mr Mrs Ms Miss Dr Sir Lord Lady /;
$alt_titles = join '|', @titles;
if( $text =~ m/^($alt_titles)\s+(.*)/ ) {
    print "$1 => $2\n";
}
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Correct. However, if you mean the array to contain plain strings you want to match literally, you need to tell that to perl, otherwise it will try to interpret them as regexen, such as interpretting dots in the strings to match any character.

$alt_titles = join '|', map quotemeta, @titles;
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Thanks for your good answers - I didn't think that would be so easy!

Another way is to change the default list separator to the pipe symbol and interpolate the array into a compiled regular expression.

my @titles = qw{ Mr Mrs Ms Miss Dr Sir Lord Lady };
my $titlesRegex = do{
   local $" = q{|};
   qr{^(@titles)\s+(.*)}
   };
if( $text =~ $titlesRegex )
{
    print qq{$1 => $2\n};
}
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