bulrush has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Perl 5.8.8. Input line is text but line contains application specific tags indicating macros/tags. There are two types of macros: <macro> and {tag}. There is text interspersed with macros I want to create an array where each entry/slot contains either text only, or just macros/tags.

Input line is: <macro1><macro2>This is line one.{tag1}<macro3>This is more text.

Output array should be: 

[0]: <macro1><macro2>
[1]: This is line one.
[2]: {tag1}<macro3>
[3]: This is more text.

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Thank you! Try to be kind, this is something new to me. Normally I don't have to separate this stuff.

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Re: How to split line of text into array containing macros and non-macro text
by hazylife (Monk) on Mar 25, 2014 at 19:22 UTC
    This will probably do the trick: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -nl

use strict;

my @fields = split /((?:<[^>]+>|\[[^]]+])+)/;
shift @fields if $fields[0] eq '';
print for @fields;

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[reply]
[d/l]
      Thank. This seems to work, but I have to hit the ENTER key when I run my test program, to see the output from the print statement. I'd like to make this a subroutine. Test program: 
      #!/usr/bin/perl -nl
use strict;
my($i,$t);

$t="<macro1>[tag1]This is plain text.<macro2>More text.[tag2]And more 
+text.";
my @fields=split /((?:<[^>]+>|\[[^]]+])+)/, $t;
shift @fields if $fields[0] eq '';
print for @fields;

exit;

      [download]
      Why do I have to hit ENTER to execute the print statement?
[reply]
[d/l]
        I have to hit the ENTER key when I run my test program
        Because you called Perl with -n which makes it read from input. See perlrun - how to execute the Perl interpreter for details.
        لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ
[reply]
[d/l]
      Oops. Unfortunately my original post had a typo. Tags should be {tag} with braces, not brackets. And I can't seem to decipher your code to replace the brackets with braces. I only see one escaped bracket, which doesn't make sense to me.
[reply]
        sub parse {
    my @fields = split /((?:<[^>]+>|{[^}]+})+)/, shift;
    shift @fields if $fields[0] eq '';
    return @fields;
}

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[reply]
[d/l]

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