in reply to split this
I think that you _can_ do it with a split:
looks as if it works on your test data.perl -le "print for split /(?=[^~\/](?:.|$))/,shift" "E/sYna~ko/"
Update Actually that should have been
but you saw thatperl -le "print for split /(?=[^~\/])/,shift" "E/sYna~ko/"
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