tr /://; print;
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Or, to avoid the third argument in split, you could use slices:

$_ = 'p:e:r:l:p:e:r:l';

@a[0..3] = split /:/;

print @a;
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But I'm not sure I've understood your question :))

# give stdin a:b or hello:world or etc:etc
while (<STDIN>){
($a,$b) = split(/:/,$_,2);
print "$a$b\n";
}
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I want to get those two values, how else can I do that with or without using split :) can I do

(split(/:/)[0..1]?  (split(/:/)[0,1]?
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Ok so I guess your print statement here isn't related to your question and that you only want to match both side of `:'
You could do so like that:

($a, $b) = /(\w+):(\w+)/;
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The regex at the right remembers the matches due to the parenthesis, and $a get the first value and $b the second.
Guillaume

I think split is exactly what you want to use. Regexes are inefficient way to do what split does.

To my mind, the better cleanup would be to get rid of the named variables and use array manipulation. Since you say in a followup that you want to read colon-delimited pairs from STDIN and keep the results, you probably want to make a whole array of them. This little slug places the pairs in an array with the first of each in even-numbered position:

my @pairs = map {chomp; split ':', $_, 2} <STDIN>;
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If one element of the pairs is suitable (no repetition), you can also make a hash, my %pairs from the map output.

After Compline,
Zaxo

Update: Added a chomp, assuming that's desirable.

I seem to remember that split quits splitting when it runs out of places to put things.

$_= "p:e:r:l";
($p,$e)=split(/:/);
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split would assign p to p e to e read in r and then stop scanning the string at that point.

So putting in the limit is not needed since split will quit scanning after filling all the requested space. Of course if you split into an array the entire input string would be scanned and split as expected.

And you don't need to tell split to split $_ since that is the default thing to split.

$_ = "p:e:r:l";
$_ =~ s/://g;    # substitue all the `:' by nothing
print "$_\n";
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I want to actually use the individual values I was thinking maybe substitute the split part with ($a,$b) = /(.*):(.*)/;