"...doesn't seem terribly elegant..."

Certainly AnnonyMonk's one-liner is more elegant, for many values of "elegant," but there's a certain elegance (IMO) to a step-by-step listing for future readers who may find the regex above a bit intimidating or even confusing.

So, inelegant though it may be (especially, "gentle, future-readers," the global variable declarations which you would do well to avoid in any substantial project), TIMTOWTDI:

#!/usr/bin/perl 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

# group adjacent-identical-chars to array elements; OP wanted "elegant
+" rather than char-by-char like this

my $str = '011122xx3x344444';
my @new_arr;
my $last_seen = '';
my $found_char = '';
my $arr_element;

while ($str =~ /([A-Z,0-9])/ig) {
    $found_char = $1;
    if ( $last_seen =~ /$found_char/ ) {
        $arr_element .= $found_char;
    } else {
        if ($found_char ) {
            push @new_arr, $arr_element; 
        }
        $arr_element = $found_char;
        $last_seen = $found_char;
    }
next;
}

push @new_arr, $arr_element;

print Dumper @new_arr;<c>

<p>which outputs:</p>

<c>$VAR1 = '0';
$VAR2 = '111';
$VAR3 = '22';
$VAR4 = 'xx';
$VAR5 = '3';
$VAR6 = 'x';
$VAR7 = '3';
$VAR8 = '44444';

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In reply to Re: Regex question by ww
in thread Regex question by Anonymous Monk

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