I've got a string inherited from an outside source that looks like this: $data = "five[5]=12345&ten[10]=12345=678=90&six[6]=123456" Now, the goal is to turn this into a name, value hash. I could do this like this: 
my ($name, $value);
my @vars = split "&", $data;
foreach (@vars) {
($name, $value) = split "=";
$hash->{$name} = $value;
}

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problem is, hash values can both have ampersands (&) and equal signs (=) in it, causing this to break. As you can see, each name is appended by the length index of it's value. I'm now trying to write a reg expression that will split this apart based on this length index: 
  while ($data =~ /(.*?)\[(\d+)\]=(.{[B]$2[/B]})/g) {
  
$hash->{$1} = $3;
  }

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However, this doesnt work because i cant figure out how to reference the length index (captured with $2) in the regex itself. The example i've given above where i simply included $2 as the length match doesnt work. also, each value still ends with an ambersand (&). If i were to include this into the regex it wouldnt match the last value which isnt followed by one. Anybody has an idea how to fix this or a more elegant way to do this. thank you.

In reply to splitting string based on length index by phi95aly

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