Just for the sake of showing another way to do it...
########################
my $input = "2-8,9,11,18-21"; $input =~ s/-/\.\./g; print join(',',eval($input));
########################
or if you don't want to print out the list but iterate through it...
########################
my $input = "2-8,9,11,18-21"; $input =~ s/-/\.\./g; foreach(eval($input)){ ...do something }
If you are accepting this string as input (from a user) then using eval is a major security risk unless you ensure that the string contains only valid data and you should probably test $@ to see if an error occurred. And you don't need to escape periods in a double quoted string.
my $input = '2-8,9,11,18-21';
$input =~ tr/0-9,-//cd; # remove invalid characters from $input
$input =~ s/-/../g; print join ',', eval $input;
die $@ if $@; # eval reported error, then die
John -- use Perl; program fulfillment
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