Masem nailed this. But on a side note, unless you are very certain that the value string cannot contain whatever your delimiter is, you are best of using the longer form of split() as follows:   my ($N, $V) = split(/delim/ $_, 2); If you don't do this, you risk truncating any values that embed the delimeter. Hand-rolled CGI form processors frequently get this wrong, turning a value of "a=b" into "a".