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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