in reply to split tosses away empty components even with positive width separators?

It is not a bug, it is a feature. ;-)

A list of two empty lists is an empty list, there is nothing tremendously paradoxical about it, it is quite natural and common sense (even though a different design decision could possibly have been made, but it would probably have led to useless complexities).

  • Comment on Re: split tosses away empty components even with positive width separators?

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Re^2: split tosses away empty components even with positive width separators?
by wrog (Friar) on May 06, 2013 at 12:32 UTC
    Perhaps so, if we were talking about a list of two empty lists, but a list of two empty strings is a totally different animal...
[reply]

      Well, one must say that the behavior shown in the following debugger session does not seem to be completely consistent. 

        DB<1>  x split /-/, "-"
  empty array
  DB<2>  x split /-/, "-foo-bar-"
0  ''
1  'foo'
2  'bar'

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        But see the documentation pointed out by RichardK: 

        >perl -wMstrict -le
"printf qq{'$_' } for split /-/, '-foo-bar-', -1;
"
'' 'foo' 'bar' ''

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