I want to change a whole word to an array without splitting it using some regular character, like ":".

Use an empty pattern then:

my @array = split //, $string;
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- Yes, I reinvent wheels.
- Spam: Visit eurotraQ.

my $string = "millenium";

my @list = ( $string =~ m/./g );

foreach my $char (@list) {
  print "$char\n";
}
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m
i
l
l
e
n
i
u
m
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my $str   = 'millenium';
my @array = map {chr} unpack 'C*',$str;
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(and yes, i will gladly explain if it is not)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

anonymous didn't say he wanted to make an array of the single characters, did he? I invoke the first virtue of programming and go for:

@a = ("millenium");

--
Brigitte    'I never met a chocolate I didnt like'    Jellinek
http://www.horus.com/~bjelli/         http://perlwelt.horus.at

my $word = 'millennium';
{
    no strict 'refs';
    @$word = ();
}
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my %arraysfromwords;
$arraysfromwords{ $word } = [];
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Another option is to upgrade to a modern version of Perl with a working split, and use Inline::C. Since a string in C can be treated as an array of char pointers, all you have to do is to pass the SV to C, extract the string, create a new AV, and populate it with pointers to the new SVs representing each character.

I'd probably just use split though, and save myself thirty seconds.

I can't test if split '' would work, but certainly you could just read your string a byte at a time with substring and push it into an array. if it was on disk you could access it with a read function.. homework? urk.