I'm not sure that what you described above is the best solution to your problem, but this will take the message and shove the words into an array: 
    @words = split /\s+/, <DATA>
    print join "\n", @words, "";

    __DATA__
    How are you?

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That prints: 
    How
    are
    you?

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Note that the last word contains punctuation. To remove punctuation, change the first line to: 
    map { s/[\?\.\!]*//g; } (@words = split /\s+/, <DATA>);

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Update: Added bit about punctuation.

Update 2: Without a more thorough description or code to look at, a better solution might be to just replace common abbreviations with the full word. For example: 
    $msg =~ s/\bu\b/you/g;    # Replace "u" with "you"
    $msg =~ s/\br\b/are/g;    # Replace "r" with "are"
    ...

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In reply to Re: Re: Parsing user input for AIM bot by The Mad Hatter
in thread Parsing user input for AIM bot by SlideE6B

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