Based on what halley(++) said, there is no specific advantage that perl 5.10 provides to resolve this.

I came up with this relatively short snippet that expresses what you want to do, and is generic enough to be extensible, yet legible (Uses 2-stages of RE extraction, and does not require you to pre-define the number of elements you expect to extract ):

my $str = 'Digits: 123689'; 

print join ',',
       m/(\d)/g 
           for  $str =~ m{Digits: \s* (\d+) }x ;

#prints:
#1,2,3,6,8,9
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