Use a regular expression. If you don't understand why this works, see perlre. Is "X" a dollar amount, an integer, or some other number format? This will work for integers: 
my $string = "foo bar baz blah Total Cost: 480 foo foo foo";
my ($cost) = $string =~ /Total\s+Cost:\s*(\d+)/;
$cost ||= 0;

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In reply to Re: Obtain information from a string by thelenm
in thread Obtain information from a string by Baz

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