If you want to SPLIT a line into FIELDS as you say you do in bash, then look up perl's split() built in subroutine... On the other hand, if what you really want is to test the characters from positionX to positionY, then use perl's unpack() function. Once you split out your field by delimiter or position, then you can test it using regular expressions to see if it is the string you want...

I'm not going to do ALL the work for you