For the OP's purpose, dont use a regular expression just to cut up a string with a static delimiter. Regular expressions aren't the answer for every last parsing problem in Perl. They are 10x slower, no matter how basic, than a couple line index and substr algorithm. Use substr and index (see my post here Re: Is Using Threads Slower Than Not Using Threads?), or as you showed, by redefining input record separator and reading "by line".