It sounds to me as though you really want to do a split, parsing your string into tokens, delimited by the ':' character.

  my @tokens = split /:/,$line;
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If you really do want to split up the line into an array of characters, you can simply use the split without a delimiting argument, which will cause your string to be split into one-character array elements.

Update: As the man without a Pony indicates below, what I mean when I say 'without a delimiting argument' is this:

  my @tokens = split //,$line;
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