Are there easy ways to acheive the general ideas here without modifying split?

Sure is. Just use the old join with '|' trick which is very useful for matching an array of patterns. You may or may not want to do a map { quotmeta } @paterns. The sort on length is so that we match '::' before ':'

$string = "a:b::c   d";
@patterns = (':','::','\s+');
my $re = join '|', sort { length $b <=> length $a } @patterns;
@fields = split /$re/, $string;
print "Got '$_'\n" for @fields;

__DATA__
Got 'a'
Got 'b'
Got 'c'
Got 'd'
[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print