This is exactly the direction I was thinking of going! Thanks!!! I will be digesting this

The problem I'm having is that I (re)process the string multiple times. That worked okay when I was doing it a few times -- perhaps several hundred or thousand times, total, in a run. But my best guess is that it will be run something between 1,500k and 3,000k times per run. Hence my hope for ideas on a better way.

Just for giggles and grins, I extracted the function I had into a standalone test script. It was probably at the top of my coding about 15+ years ago. Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

my $which = 3;
my $div = '!!!';
my $str = 'asdf' . $div . 'qwer' . $div . 'zxcv' . $div . 'hjkl' . $di
+v . 'yuio' . $div . 'vbmn';

my @stuff;
my $spot = 0;
my $result = index($str, $div, $spot);

print "str: [$str]\n";
while ($result != -1) {

    print "Found '$div' at $result\n";
    my $start_spot = ($spot ? $spot + length($div) - 1 : 0);
    my $field_length = ($spot ? $result - $spot - length($div) + 1 : $
+result - $spot);
    push @stuff, substr($str, $start_spot, $field_length);

    $spot = $result + 1;
    $result = index($str, $div, $spot);
    }

print @stuff . "\n";
print '-- #' . $which . '=' . @stuff[$which-1] . "\n";
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I am continually amazed and pleased at the quality of the responses I get/see here on perlmonks! Thanks, y'all!!!