I think we'll agree to disagree on that one Tim :)

Your solution could easily be made pass Perlcritic, throw in a few flags on the RE, remove the parens around the built-in split function, quote the string with q{} rather than '' and Conway would not complain :)

I just like the more explicit declaration I use. It takes a little longer to write, but it's easier to read, which I think matters too.

I hope you don't mind my taking your comment as a compliment? If your biggest quibble is my choice of coding style then I can't have made a complete balls of the module :)

Bart.

P.S.
Don't look at vesion 0.1 of the code, that really was a mess!