I would like to split at 30 or the nearest word boundary

Nearest word boundary before or after the 30 characters? How to ask better questions using Test::More and sample data.

Update: To answer your question "is it possible to stop unpack splitting words?" - No, unpack isn't meant for that. Probably a regular expression would be best, but as I said above, please be more specific as to what your input and expected output is.