in reply to Re^2: nth field extraction
in thread nth field extraction

Thanks for the (probably obvious) pointer into using a variable in the split command. If I was writing this today, I'd probably have checked to see if that was a possibility. I have a vague memory from back when I wrote the function (15+/- years ago), and couldn't get that construct working.

You might have not recognized the significance of \Q in return (split /\Q$sep/, $source)[ $field-1 ]); The \Q says to ignore any characters in $sep that would otherwise mean something to the regex engine. I often use a \Q...\E pair for this just to highlight this situation. Anyway without \Q, if $sep contains something that matters to the regex engine, you will get confusing results.

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