Or probably the simplest

my @d = $field =~ m[.{1,$n}]g;

OH... it is beautiful! I just plugged it into "filename -> hash" function to convert filenames such as "access_log.03020700.gz" into hashes that are something like:

{
  type => "access_log",
  year => "03",
  month => "02",
  day => "07",
  hour => "00"
  compressed => "1"
}
[download]

... needless to say, logfile munging of usage statistics is going splendidly now!

I feel like I've graduated from 1st grade of perl primary school... I'm actually Extracting Practical Reports from data!