I might be incorrect regarding Perl's "scan" function, but I think you can implement it like this: my $s = "foo bar baz"; my @b = $s =~ /\w+/g; Granted, t

I might be incorrect regarding Perl's "scan" function, but I think you can implement it like this: my $s = "foo bar baz"; my @b = $s =~ /\w+/g; Granted, this is not a scanf, but neither are PHP/Python/Ruby examples.