my ($y, $m, $d) = $today =~ /(\d){4}(\d){2}(\d){2}/;

..although as a previous poster mentioned, you might lose a little in readability.

You will want to move the closing parens to after the quantifiers for each group of digits, or you'll lose more than just readability ;)

As written, the regex will only capture the last digit in each group. 

my $today = 20050622;
my ($y, $m, $d) = $today =~ /(\d){4}(\d){2}(\d){2}/;
print join ":", $y, $m, $d;
# prints 5:6:2, not 2005:06:22

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In reply to Re^2: splitting a string into arbitrary lengths by bmann
in thread splitting a string into arbitrary lengths by ryanc

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