As an elaboration on svenXY's answer: Presumably your problem is that you tried split /+/, $string and got the complaint Quantifier follows nothing in regex …. That's because + has special meaning to the regex engine ("one or more of the preceding …"), so you need to escape it with a backslash to remove its special meaning. That gives split /\+/, $string, as indicated. See Regular Expressions for more details on special characters (and a lot of other things).