You count the characters in a string use length. To split a string into substrings use substr.

But to take a piece of text and wrap it into lines of a certain length, use the Text::Wrap module.

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

my $string = "This is a test string containing fifty-four characters";

# for example, we'll set limit at 25
my $limit = 25;

my @lines = ();

push @lines, $_ for ($string =~  /\s*(.{0,$limit}\b)gs);

# regex explanation
\s*        - match any leading spaces
(          - start match
.          - match any character
{0,$limit} - up to $limit times
)          - end match
\b         - followed by a word boundary

# modifiers
g - global (match as many times as you can)
s - treat whole string as a single line.
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hth

cLive ;-)

You could of course embed the comments into the regex itself, with the /x modifier:

/
    \s*              # Leading whitespace
    (                # Save match group
        .            # Any character
        {0,$limit}   # Up to $limit times
    )                # End of match group
    \b               # Word boundary
/gsx                 # Global, single line, extended
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- Yes, I reinvent wheels.
- Spam: Visit eurotraQ.

There are functions in perl that tell you the number of characters in a string. You could use the "length" function, for example:

$string="fart";
$x=length($string);
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This would set the value of $x to 4.

As far as recognizing words are concerned, you could use the "split" function to separate the string you're working on into elements of an array in which each element consists of 1 word. For example:

$string="I've just farted";
@stringarray=split(' ',$string);
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In the above code, the elemets of the "@stringarray" array were set as follows:

$stringarray[0]="I've"
$stringarray[1]="just"
$stringarray[2]="farted"
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So "@stringarray" actually contains the whole sentence separated into words.

2002-04-21 Edit by Corion : Added formatting