in reply to How to get split $var to work like split ' '?

There's always the eval solution. 

my $sep = ' ';
$, = ', ';       
$\ = $/;
my $string = "          Hello World";

print split ' ', $string;
print split $sep, $string; # This does not work
print eval qq< split '$sep', \$string >;

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Hello, World
, , , , , , , , , , Hello, World
Hello, World

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This could do the trick as long as you don't try to use regexes. And maybe escaping the quotes in $sep would be a good idea too :P

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Re^2: How to get split $var to work like split ' '?
by QM (Parson) on Sep 11, 2013 at 08:12 UTC
    Yes, that occurred to me later.

    Still, to follow the Principle of Least Astonishment, I'd like to be able to specify a regex. To avoid further if then's, I'd probably set the default like so: 

    my $sep = q/' '/;
$sep = shift @ARGV if @ARGV; # you get the idea
my $line = "   one two three   \n";
my @words = eval qq(split $sep, \$line);

    [download]

    Then something evaluating to a regex must be used, such as: 

    $sep = q(/\s+/);
$sep = q(//);
$sep = q(/two|\s+/);
$sep = q(m|/|);

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    But the delimiters must be part of the string.

    (I'm ignoring for now the security issue of letting the user specify a regex, as this is a script just for me. And I'm not up to untainting the full regex language, so I can't see letting this into the wild hands of colleagues.)

    -QM
    --
    Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

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