Questions about split

blax has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

My first question is can you have split return just the second match instead of one and two. To get that result Ive been doing it like this:

($foo, $match_I_want) = split /:/, $_, [2];
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My second and last question is why the following did not work:

($user, $foo{$user}) = split /:/, $_, [2];
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I did get it to work by doing this:

($user) = split /:/, $_, [1];
($temp, $foo{$user}) = split /:/, $_, [2];
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Thanks in advance,
blax