hi, In you code, split returns all fields found in $ip using '.' metacharacter as a delimiter. '.' metacharacter matches almost any character but newline. As a consequence,@t will contain invisible characters as NUL character and \n. When you do :

map { print ord $_,"\n" } split(/./, $ip);
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You 'll print the ascii code of each element in the returned list by split function. Here's the output i get :

0 

0 

0 

0 

0 

10 

0 is the ascii NUL and 10 is the newline character. I hope you understand these explanations, Arnaud