Yes, you can definitely use a regular expression in split. In fact, that's what split expects you to give it.

For example, I could say

    my $string = "foo , bar";
    my @pieces = split /\s*,\s*/, $string;
[download]

to split $string on a comma surrounded by optional whitespace.

A regular expression is different than a substitution, though. So I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do. Could you give a little more context for the particular problem you're working on?