in reply to string manipulation

You are new to Perl. You will probably save yourself a ton of time if you start all of your scripts by turning on warnings and using strict. For example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict;
The path to perl might need to be adjusted if your copy of Perl wasn't "correctly" installed and on newer versions of Perl you can do use warnings instead.

Try these on the above script and you might get a clue that in Perl strings are not arrays. (:

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")