chromatic is 100% right about the greediness part.

I did some testing (I cant say I really master regex in Perl, I just hammer them till they work :-) and this does what you want: @s=split /^\s+user: \d+\n/sm, $source; Translated to English, that is "split $source at each line starting with an number of spaces, followed by user: and a number and a newline", using the s and m modifiers to read $source as a multiline string but matching the ^ at the beggining of each line

Hope it helps.