How can I cleanly split a string of text into a two-dimensional array

I want to take a long string of text and split it into a two-dimensional array of $width x $height. I know of several ways to do this but none of them are as quick and dirty as I'd like them to be? Any suggestions?

Some clarification: I want to read in the data from a bitmap say a PGM file where each 'character' is a pixel. First I'm going to break the header off the string, after that I want to split the data portion into a 2-D array of $widthx$height. I know of ways to do this but am looking for something really quick and clever.

[chromatic]

How about:

my $data = "whatever";
my @pixels = [][];
for (my $i = 1; $i < $height; $i++) {
    (@pixels[$i][1 .. $width], $data) = split('', $data, $width);
}

(untested)

[fenonn]

Well if there is a char that marks the end of a row (new line for example) you could try something like this.

@array = map { [split//] } (split/\n/,$string);

[da w00t]

would something liek this work?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Data::Dumper;

open(FILE,"<xpm-pic");
$row=-1;$col=-1;
while (<FILE>) {
  chomp;
  $row++;
  $col=-1;
  foreach $char (split //) {
    $col++;$pix[$row][$col]=$char;
  }
}
print Dumper(\@pix);

[nothingmuch]

map { [ split '', $_ ] }
    unpack join(" ", ("a$width") x $height), $string;

[root]

I'm not sure the problem is clear. What do you want each element of an array to be? You could always use nested Foreach loops, of course...

[BBQ]

I agree with root. I guess giving a purpose for the split might be more enlightning. What do you want the two arrays do? What should they control? Are we talking bitmaps here?