This would greatly improve the readability of many regular expressions I write, and when I write a single literal space in my regexes I almost always mean \s* anyway. So, is there a "mode" in Perl regular expressions that enables this, like /s to make . match newlines, etc.? A cursory read through perlre didn't give anything, but maybe I missed something or maybe there's a different way to achieve this?
Edit: What I mean is, currently I write qr/^\s*var\s+items\s*=\s*[\s*$/, and I'd instead like to write qr/^ var\s+items = [ $/ and have it mean the same thing using some means- and my question is whether such a means exists.