invaderzard, just wanted to make clear that this solution by Kenosis is the far quicker and easier version, which I'd, of course use anytime I'd just need a quick split by a field separator on an input.

But: There is one caveat here to keep in mind. Split, of course, does not test the format of the input. So if you wanted the second field of a record that goes like this:

$record = 'A;B;C;D';
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then

$second_field = (split ';', $record)[1];
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does work. However so it does for inputs like:

A;B
#foo;B;ar
;B
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All of the above inputs would leave a B in $second_field. Which, you know might be correct in a particular case, but in general, we don't want to just ignore malformed records, so if we, say, iterate over records, then make sure to test and capture using a regexp in an if:

if($record =~ m/^.;(.);.;.$/) {
  $second_field = $1;
}
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Now this will only set $second_field if the record matches the four single-character fields delimited by one semicolon format. Even if the input is ';;;;;;;'. ;)

Have fun with regexen. They're cool. ;)

So long,
Flexx