use strict;
use warnings;

my $txt = "just wondering how i can have perl display part of my long memo. basically i want the first lets say 255 charachters of the paragraph. im really new to perl so i don't know how i would come about this? a regex perhaps? just started reading about that today. so basically something like";

my @a = split("",$txt); 
my $l = 7;

for (my $i=0; $i < $l; $i++) {
    print $a[$i];
    $l++ if ($i ==($l-1) && ($a[$i] ne " " )) ;
}