Don't forget about trusty command-line options, they can come in pretty handy. -a does a split on whitespace into the @F array. 

echo elem1 elem2 elem3 elem4 elem5 | perl -lane 'print $F[3];'
elem4

[download]
And speaking of Davido's thread, if you're shamelessly going for extra XP, there's always the ever-present @ARGV array: 

perl -le 'print $ARGV[3]' elem1 elem2 elem3 elem4 elem5
elem4

[download]

In reply to Re: Capturing the nth word in a string by delirium
in thread Capturing the nth word in a string by Roger

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