$input = "AR12CR32LC85AR16";
@fourbytes= unpack("A4" x (length($input)/4), $input);
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@fourbytes= unpack("A4" x (length($input)/4), $input);
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Careful: this will strip spaces of the end of each string. Use "a4" instead of "A4" as a template to prevent that.

++, nice catch.

-Waswas

I believe the bit with spaces in it was sample output data, not sample input data, so your post works. Plus it is the canonical way to do this kind of thing, so ++

Makeshifts last the longest.

/(.{4})/g does the job:

perl -e '@a = "AR12CR32LC85AR16" =~ /(.{4})/g; print join(" ", @a)'

AR12 CR32 LC85 AR16
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Rather than a regex you could also use substr:

my @array = ();
while($string) {
     push(@array,substr($string,0,4,''));
}

print join(" ",@array);
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Chris

The following works for your example, at least:

my $str = 'AR12CR32LC85AR16' ;
my @arr = map { /(.{4})/g } $str ;
print "@arr\n" ;
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Be careful with the distinction between 4-byte and 4-character words -- I believe it depends on what character encoding you use.

Update: OK, that map probably wasn't a good idea... go with the post previous to this instead.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who
would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.
            --Friedrich Nietzsche