As other monks have mentioned, you can certainly use a regex in split. If you want to divide a string into parts based on field length rather than a specific delimiter (pattern), however, you can also use unpack.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = '1234 this is the remaining string';

# A4 = take the first 4 ASCII characters
#  x = skip the next byte
# A* = take all remaining ASCII characters
my ( $num, $text ) = unpack( 'A4xA*', $string );

print "[$num][$text]\n";
[download]

Prints:

[1234][this is the remaining string]
[download]

pack and unpack can be confusing. Pack/Unpack Tutorial (aka How the System Stores Data) is a great tutorial to get you started, and Super Search will help you find other references.

Update:
unpack significantly outperforms both split and the regex approach, as shown below (I used BrowserUK's code in Re: can split() use a regex? for the other two approaches):

use strict;
use warnings;

use Benchmark qw( cmpthese );

my $string = '1234 this is the remaining string';

cmpthese( -5, {
                unpack => sub { unpack( 'A4xA*', $string ) },
                regex  => sub { $string =~ m[(\d+)\s+(.*)$] },
                split  => sub { split( /(\d+)\s+/, $string, 2 ) },
              } );
[download]

Results:

            Rate  split  regex unpack
split   789472/s     --   -44%   -70%
regex  1422218/s    80%     --   -45%
unpack 2594984/s   229%    82%     --
[download]

HTH

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