my @id = split /-|\s/, $ident;
[download]

The above code would solve the problem illustrated in the text of your question. Notice: I used \s to indicate "space". \s is not strictly synonomous with "space", as it also matches tab, newline, etc. You could use the actual space character in your split regex. I used \s to make it easy to read the regex.

The subject of your question, "Splitting Arrays" doesn't match the text of your question. Is there something you left out? We're not splitting arrays here, we're splitting strings into an array.

This is my take on your problem using split twice with array of anonymous arrays.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @strings;

while (<DATA>) {
        #  Split up input stream using dashes
        my @smallarray = split '-';     #  @smallarray now has 'aaa bb
+b ccc', etc.

        #  Iterate through @smallarray items and split them up using s
+paces
        #  Create an array of anonymous array references
        #  The references are the array resulting from split, using []
        push(@strings, [split /\s/]) foreach (@smallarray);
}
[download]

#  Print out the whole AoA contents
foreach my $arrayref (@strings) {
        print "$_\n" foreach @$arrayref;
}

print "----\n\n";

#  Or just the contents of one group
foreach my $item (@{$strings[0]}) {
        print "$item\n";
}

__DATA__
aaa bbb ccc-ddd eee fff-ggg hhh iii-jjj kkk lll-

__OUTPUT__
aaa
bbb
ccc
ddd
eee
fff
ggg
hhh
iii
jjj
kkk
lll
----

aaa
bbb
ccc
[download]

--
Allolex

Perl and Linguistics
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistics.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3394
http://www.wall.org/~larry/keynote/keynote.html