in reply to split a squence by 3 letters

What have you tried? Here is a simple, although unmaintainable, solution that may give you a starting point.

perl -ne 'chomp; my @data; push @data, $1 while s/^(...)//; print join +(":", @data), ", rest=:$_:\n";'

--MidLifeXis

The tomes, scrolls etc are dusty because they reside in a dusty old house, not because they're unused. --hangon in this post