In Perl, you can use the index of [-1] to indicate the last array element. A REGEX would work fine here also. I don't know without benchmarking, but I suspect that the regex version is actually faster.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $line ='last -- From --00--SPLIT ?--11452';

my ($last) = (split(/--/, $line))[-1];
print "using split: $last\n"; 

($last) = $line =~ /(\d+)\s*$/;
print "using regex: $last\n";

__END__
Prints:
using split: 11452
using regex: 11452
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Update: I guess I should say that the parens around ($last) are necessary to put $last into a list context, otherwise you just get 1 or 0 value. Here we want the actual value that was captured rather than whether it the expression "worked" or "not.