This will extract anything up to 12 characters (greedy) that is followed by whitespace. It does what you described, but needs work to be of more general use. 

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = 'this is a test message';
my ($chunk) = $string =~ /(.{1,12})\s/;

print $chunk, "\n";

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pbeckingham - typist, perishable vertebrate.

In reply to Re: Splitting a string into words by pbeckingham
in thread Splitting a string into words by webchalkboard

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