No, you can't, since $m's length is used to stop the looping of the program. It has to have length of 9.

chop($m="XO"x5);  # 16
$m="XOXOXOXOX";   # 15
$x="X"."OX"x4;    # 14
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There's a one character optimization. Oh, and I left out a . from my code (and thus, it shows above in yours) at the $p{7}. It should be $p.{7}.

japhy -- Perl and Regex Hacker