Have you considered trying the code and looking at how it splits the input?

In perlre, you find the documentation of how regular expressions are constructed.

... and if you don't understand perlre (it's more reference documentation than introduction) read perlretut instead.

Or you could use the module YAPE::Regex::Explain, which gives you a human readable description of what it matches.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

$_ = "{Just} another, Perl*hacker.";
my @rray = split /[{},*]/, $_;
print Dumper( \@rray);
[download]

$VAR1 = [
          '',
          'Just',
          ' another',
          ' Perl',
          'hacker.'
        ];
[download]

In a regex, [] surround a "character class", meaning that it matches any of the characters inside the square brackets.

Since split divides a string based on its delimiter regex, in this case, your input string is being split on any of the { } , * characters.

$ $ perl -e'print "$_\n" foreach split /[,{}*]/,"this{is*a}test,of"'
this
is
a
test
of
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thanks to all, i will go through the documentation