Er, hang on, the first argument to split is a regular expression - however it is quoted. Your snippet will split on any any character - and thus nothing will be assigned to $args1 and $args2. This can be demonstrated by the following :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $string = 'this is a test';

my @foo = split('(.)', $string);

print join('*',@foo);
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If you read the perlfunc entry for split you will see that using the '()' in the regular expression includes the delimiting character in the output substrings.

/J\