in reply to split fixed string into character pairs

The following solution is not very scaleable, not really perlish (other than being an example for TIMOTOWTDI), but at least easily understable ...:
my $str = "abcdef"; my $v1 = substr $str, 0,2; my $v2 = substr $str, 2,2; my $v3 = substr $str, 4,2;