I'm sure a true perl master could condense that into 1-2 lines.

But a true Perl master would go for clarity over conciseness unless the circumstances dictate otherwise.

True, true. Again, I am outclassed =)

Peace,
LassiLantar

I'm pretty sure you can make this code shorter if you really want to, but I am curious why you chose to substitute all lines. That, to me, looks like a lot of useless hassle ;)

Anyways, for the OP, my €0,02:

while(<DATA>) { 
   print "<$1>$1$2<$1>" if $_ =~ m|(\w{2})(.*)|;
}
__DATA__
il yadayadayada
df yadayadayada
[download]

<snappy comeback> Well, he said each line had a tag on the beginning of it, so I figured it would be extra to deal with checking whether it did. </snappy comeback>

<real excuse> Didn't think of it =) </real excuse>

Peace,
LA

#!/usr/bin/perl

# you have to use strict and warnings unless you
# have a really good reason not to.
use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = "il asdfasdfasdf";
my $tag = "";

# use matching here instead of substitution
# all of the string should appear in the output
# also, don't need square brackets in match
if ($string =~ m/(\S{2})/)
{
    $tag = "<$1>";
}

# you don't need to concatenate, just interpolate the lot
$string = "$tag $string $tag";
print "string = $string\n";

__END__
[download]

I must not be a true perl master, because I hacked on your program and it got BIGGER!

Gwuahaha! I am superior! (read: I am too lazy to write in use strict/use warnings on PM). I agree with you, use strict and warnings are totally necessary. I'm so lazy I even sometimes try to circumvent use strict by redeclaring my variables in random places, but really they're improving the way I write code. (As is sparring with the monks).

Peace,
LassiLantar