Why? Perl has very good string handling that generally works much faster on strings than any code that deals with characters one at a time. Tell us what you want to do and we can probably show you a Perlish way to achieve your end that runs much faster than dealing a character at a time.

How about sorting an array of words by the second character of every word? Can that be achieved without splitting the words into characters?

#!/usr/bin/perl 

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

chomp( my @words = <DATA> );
@words = sort { substr( $a, 1, 1 ) cmp substr( $b, 1, 1 ) } @words;
say for @words;

__DATA__
How
about
sorting
an
array
of
words
by
the
second
character
every
word
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Just look at the second character.

my @sorted_by_second =
        map   { $_->[0] }
        sort  { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
        map   { [$_, substr($_,1,1)] }
        @unsorted;
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my @each_char = split //, $string;
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split'[\w|\W]';
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my @array;
for(0..$#string){
my $i = $_;
push @array,substr($string,$1,1);
}
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I'm not sure why you would want to split on word or non-word characters ([\w|\W]) instead of on an empty string:

$ perl -e 'print "$_\n" for split "", "foo"'
f
o
o
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But, as GrandFather already pointed out, if you think you want to process a string character-by-character in Perl, then the odds are pretty good that you're doing it wrong.

You're mixing two concepts together. When you said

split /[\w|\W]/
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you meant

split /[\w\W]/
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or

split /\w|\W/
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The above would be better written as

split /./s
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That said, it doesn't work. If you want to separate every character, the characters aren't the separators, the nothings between each character are. You want:

split //, $x
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The following would also do:

$x =~ /./sg
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split'[\w|\W]';
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my @array;
for(0..$#string){
   my $i = $_;
   push @array,substr($string,$1,1);
}
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