split takes a pattern (more or less a regular expression, though there are special cases you might want to read up on), not a static string to separate chunks in the input string, and it happens that the '+' character is special, so you just need to escape it like so:

@array = split '\+', 'abc+def';
print "@array";
[download]

gives abc def By the way, you might want to provide the actual error message in future if you need assistance, as "chucking a spazz" covers a lot of bases!

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser