You might also consider using split() and use its optional third parameter to tell it to only break it into two chunks.

my( $before, $after ) = split /$breakline/, $content, 2;
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If you $breakline might have regex special characters in it, you might want to escape those with either quotemeta() or the \Q.

my( $before, $after ) = split /\Q$breakline/, $content, 2;
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Try something more like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

#use LWP::Simple;
#my $content = get("http://www.url.com/scripttemplate.shtml");

my $breakline = "<!-- SCRIPT TEMPLATE BREAKS HERE -->";

my $content = "This is the first part\n" . $breakline . "This is the l
+ast part\n";

$content =~ m|(.*)$breakline(.*)|s;

print "First Var contains:  $1";
print "Second Var contains: $2";
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This produces

First Var contains:  This is the first part
Second Var contains: This is the last part
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You don't need the while loop, since you're not checking line by line. You want to search the entire string in one pass. That's what the /s modifier is doing in the regex...it's ignoring the line endings.

HTH,

Larry

UPDATE: ysth's explanation is much better than the one I provided here. Not only that, it's correct, too. :) The /s modifier is not ignoring the newlines. It's allowing the . to match newline characters as well. My haste caused me to misrepresent what was actually happening. :)

More precisely, the /s modifier tells . to match even newline characters. Without it, your $1 and $2 will only get what is before and after $breakline on the same line.