This sounds interesting! The main reason I moved to perl instead of sed or AWK is for better control. Shell scripts don’t differentiate between variables and data (anyone else still having nightmares from trying to escape quotes and meta chars in a shell?).

Perl gives you all the simple features from sed or AWK and adds useful (maintainable) foreach iterators, arrays, hashes, etc.

Recommend using Strict mode if you are new to Perl. It gives good guardrails against silly mistakes like not declaring or misspelling a variables, or accessing strings or numbers that aren’t the correct datatype.