use strict;
my $str = 'It reported the proportion of the edits made from America was 51% for the Wikipedia, and 25% for the simple Wikipedia.[142] The Wikimedia Foundation hopes to increase the number in the Global South to 37% by 2015.[143]';
my $regex = qr/(\.\[[^][]*\])\s*/mp;
my $subst = '\\1\\n';
my $result = $str =~ s/$regex/$subst/rg;
print "The result of the substitution is' $result\n";
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for Perl, please visit: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html