in reply to Why is split ' ' ne split /\s+/?

I seek an explanation of why?

:) study history :D

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Re^2: Why is split ' ' ne split /\s+/?
by Marshall (Canon) on Jul 05, 2016 at 01:13 UTC
    I do not consider that a particularly helpful answer.
      Magic split, using the space, is spelled out in perldoc -f split as such:

      As another special case, split emulates the default behavior of the command line tool awk when the PATTERN is either omitted or a string composed of a single space character (such as ' ' or "\x20" , but not e.g. / / ). In this case, any leading whitespace in EXPR is removed before splitting occurs, and the PATTERN is instead treated as if it were /\s+/ ; in particular, this means that any contiguous whitespace (not just a single space character) is used as a separator. However, this special treatment can be avoided by specifying the pattern / / instead of the string " " , thereby allowing only a single space character to be a separator. In earlier Perls this special case was restricted to the use of a plain " " as the pattern argument to split; in Perl 5.18.0 and later this special case is triggered by any expression which evaluates to the simple string " " .

      If omitted, PATTERN defaults to a single space, " " , triggering the previously described awk emulation.

        That was helpful++! Thanks!