Oh, using a module is *the* Perl way to go, of course, but what about this method using just a regexp? push @lines, $1 while $text =~ s/(.{1,250})\s+//; push @lines, $text if $text; # orphaned text Depending on what you want to do with newlines you might want to add the /s switch to the regexp. -- Bill Moseley moseley at hank.org