Hello previous,

TMTOWTDI: Put the separator in a single capture group:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump;

my  $eqn  = '$profit=$sales-$cogs';
my  @wrds =  split /(=|-)/, $eqn;
dd \@wrds;
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Output:

23:13 >perl 1596_SoPW.pl
["\$profit", "=", "\$sales", "-", "\$cogs"]

23:13 >
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See the final paragraph of split.

Hope that helps,