I wouldn't do it that way. The problem is that you can't be sure that there will only be two fields. You're better off assigning into an array, since arrays can hold zero to darn-near-infinite number of items.

I don't understand. my ($this, $that) = split(/,/, $string); how is this an array? I had to create my variables before my split.

Ah, but in perl, arrays are a single variable that can hold a dynamic number of values! So you don't need to know beforehand how many values will result from the split; you can just do:

  my @words = split /,/, $string;
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Then, to figure out how many words resulted, you can just use @words in a scalar context:

  # find out information about the entire array
  print "found " . scalar( @words ) . " words\n";

  # do stuff with each member of the array
  foreach my $word ( @words ) { print "  word: $word\n"; }
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