Re: Splitting a string into words

[pbeckingham]

This will extract anything up to 12 characters (greedy) that is followed by whitespace. It does what you described, but needs work to be of more general use.

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = 'this is a test message';
my ($chunk) = $string =~ /(.{1,12})\s/;

print $chunk, "\n";

[ikegami]

(?:\s|$) works better than \s.

An other alternative is \b, which will chop after a word, but before punctuation.

[tphyahoo]

Depends on what a word is. If a word is \w+, this variant might be of use: ((\s|\w){0,11})(\s|$)