split /[^:]\s+/, $s

That's not going to do what you hoped as it will consume the last character of each value except the one at the end of the string. You can get around that by using a negative look-behind. I also use map to avoid the for loop and temporary variables.

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;

my $s = q{   ABC: 123 xyz: 100    def: YYY    aaa: ZZZ};

my %extract =
   map { split m{\s*:\s*} }
   split m{(?<!:)\s+}, $s;

print Data::Dumper->Dumpxs( [ \ %extract ], [ q{*extract} ] );

[download]

This produces

%extract = (
             'ABC' => '123',
             'def' => 'YYY',
             'aaa' => 'ZZZ',
             'xyz' => '100'
           );

[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re^2: extracting the key value pairs from a string by johngg
in thread extracting the key value pairs from a string by mnranjeeth

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