G'day lonewolf28,

If you look at the documentation for the split function, you'll see that the first argument to split is a "PATTERN".

Your "PATTERN" is: zero-length-string OR zero-length-string

And, with the last part being totally redundant, just: zero-length-string

The output is entirely to be expected. The split documentation discusses outcomes with zero-length patterns.

A better "PATTERN" would be: /[|]/

See also: Perl Regular Expressions Tutorial

I believe you're running into some *special* cases when using a double-quoted literal and the pipe symbol. Normally the pipe symbol would be used for ORing your pattern. "i|A" would split on the characters i or A. When you want the pattern to match the pipe symbol, you would need to escape it with a backslash "\|" - however in this case when you double-quote and backslash, it is not escaped -- you need to single quote and backslash. I normally opt to use a regex as the PATTERN in split -- to me it's more readaable:

my( $first, $second ) = split /\|/, $string;
[download]

My personal preference is to "escape" such metacharacters (and the space character) within a character class: [|]. This avoids incipient LTS and is also written the same in all variations:  /[|]/  "[|]"  '[|]'

---

Give a man a fish:  <%-(-(-(-<

Even if i backslash it i get the same....

my $string = 'osSE5Gu0Vi8WRq93UvkYZCjaOKeNJfTyH6tzDQbxFm4M1ndXIPh27wBA
+ rLclpg| 3 35 27 62 51 27 46 57 26 10 46 63 57 45 15 43 53';

my ( $first, $second ) = split ( "\|", $string );
say "first:", $first;
say "second:", $second;

output:
first:o
second:s
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c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -le
"my $s = 'first|second|third';
 my @ra = split '[|]', $s;
 dd \@ra;
"
["first", "second", "third"]
[download]

Also works with  "[|]" and  /[|]/

Update: The reason  "\|" doesn't work is that in double-quote interpolation, the  \ (backslash) acts, in this case, on the  | (pipe) to produce a literal pipe. Double-quotish interpolation would need a doubled backslash to yield a single literal backslash in the compiled string:

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -le
"my $s = qq{\|};
 print qq{:$s:};
 ;;
 my $t = qq{\\|};
 print qq{:$t:};
"
:|:
:\|:
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That's why it's generally better to use  qr{pattern} to compile a regex. (I use  qq{...} in the example because Windows command line uses "..." to quote everything and  qq{...} reduces the need for backslashes.) Contrast with  '\|' and  '\\|' Please see Quote and Quote-like Operators and Quote-Like Operators.

---

Give a man a fish:  <%-(-(-(-<

Right ... as I said, if you want to use quotes instead of a regex pattern, use single quotes. Double quotes cause interpolation to happen which you don't want here.

-derby

my $string = 'osSE5Gu0Vi8WRq93UvkYZCjaOKeNJfTyH6tzDQbxFm4M1ndXIPh27wBA
+ rLclpg| 3 35 27 62 51 27 46 57 26 10 46 63 57 45 15 43 53';
my ( $first, $second ) = split ( /\|/, $string );
print  "first:", $first,"\n";
print "second:", $second,"\n";
[download]