note nithins <p> But my qn is i have a variable say $a= 23 , now i need to add it as 2+3 which should give me ans 5 ... hw to do this ???</P> <p>23 s stored as a single byte hence i cant split. But in words we can split character by character of a word in an array </p> <code> my @a = qw (data); foreach $aa(@a){ print $aa."\n"; } </code> <p>the above code will not work the sane for integers</P> 1007508 1007526