$data =~ s/(....)(....)/$1/g;
[download]

is your regex... Funny way to store the data though... First of all, as someone else said, you're not looking for characters, you're looking for character/space pairs.

In fact you're looking for pairs of character/space pairs.

In fact you're looking for every other pair of character/space pairs...

The nice way:

@characters = <DATA> =~ /(.) /g;
while(@characters) { push @pairs, [shift @characters, shift @character
+s] }
@selection = map { $pairs[$_*2] } (0..@characters/2);
[download]