Aha!

Let's keep trying it regex-less.

If you need just any second character, you could use substr:

my $str='xjxexrxoxexnxexsxxx';
my $idx = -1;
my $str_2nd = '';
 
$str_2nd .= substr( $str, $idx+=2, 1) while( $idx < length $str);
 
print "\n$str_2nd\n";
[download]

You can achieve the same with split:

my $str='xjxexrxoxexnxexsxxx';
 
my @chars = split //, $str;
my @chars_2nd;

while ( scalar @chars ){
  shift @chars;
  push @chars_2nd, shift @chars;
}
 
print join '', @chars_2nd;
[download]

Is this more like it? Just note that these solutions don't know what each other character ('x') is. It gets trickier if you allow more than one character between each delimiter 'x'.

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)