my @counts = map { length } $string =~ /1(0*)/g;
[download]

Update: To get a count of characters after each 1, you could do something like

my @counts = map { length } $string =~ /1(?=(.*))/g;
[download]

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

The code below will do this, but rather than putting it into named variables like you say, it uses an array. One would have to use symbolic references (or an array of references that went to an arbitrary length) otherwise.

    $str = '1000000000000100000000000000100';

    while (($pos = index($str, '1', ($pos ? $pos + 1 : 0)))
            >= 0)
    {
        push(@length, length($str) - $pos - 1);
        $pos++;
    }

    for (1 .. @length)
    {
        print "\$var$_ would get $length[$_-1] bits\n";
    }
[download]

When run, this gives me:

$var1 would get 30 bits
$var2 would get 17 bits
$var3 would get 2 bits

--rjray

The idea is quite simple :
Just split up the string at every 1 and then count how long the sequences of zeroes are that you got back. As a one-liner, this looks like

perl -e "print length,qq(\n) for split /1/,'10000000000001000000000000
+00100';"
[download]

As a full-blown Perl program, this would look somewhat like this :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while (<DATA>) {
  my @bits = split /1/;
  # every string starts with a 1, so 
  # pop the first zero off of @bits
  pop @bits; 
  print join( ",", @bits ), "\n";
};
__DATA__
1000000000000100000000000000100
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perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
[download]

That won't produce the output he wanted. He wants the length of the string remaining from each 1 to the end of the string. This only counts the number of 0's between the 1's.

--rjray

my $string = "1000000000000100000000000000100";
my $count = 0;

$string =~ s/1/eval('$var' . ++$count . q(=length$'))/eg;

print "$var1\n", "$var2\n", "$var3\n";
[download]

Disclaimer: this is just some for-fun code. We need more laughs. It does do the work though. :)