If you happen to have a lot of patterns to match, I like the "build a sub on the fly" approach

     my @patterns = qw/ foo bar baz /;

     ## if you need to return the pattern itself, return '$_' instead
     my $match_n_return = join( "\n",
              map{  "return \$1 if \$_[0] =~ /$_/o;" } @patterns
     );
     my $sub =  eval qq|sub  { $match_n_return return undef }|;
     if( $@ ) {
           ## some syntax error in the eval string
           die $@
      }

      my $matched = $sub->( "string you want to match" );
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The only problem here is, you don't get a fine granularity of control for each match. But I like the fact that this can be used over and over, and that since all the regexes are pre-compiled, you save some time for repeated use