perl -E "my $string='nick,1,2,,56,88'; my @array = split(/\,/, $string
+); my $size = @array; say 'Size: ', $size; say for @array"
Size: 6
nick
1
2

56
88
[download]

as ++Eily said while I was typing this up: unless you throw away the 'nick' element somehow, it's 6 elements. I tried on an ancient linux perl and on a recent windows strawberry perl, and both gave the counts (6) I would expect:

perl -le 'print $]; @a = split/,/,"nick,1,2,,56,88"; print scalar @a' 
+; perl -V:osname
5.008005
6
osname='linux';
[download]

and

perl -le "print $]; @a=split/,/,'nick,1,2,,56,88'; print scalar @a" & 
+perl -V:osname
5.026002
6
osname='MSWin32';
[download]

edit: and I also meant to say, the proper way to parse CSV is with Text::CSV

Hello Anonymous Monk,

Just to add something minor here. I My personal preference that helps me a lot to debug my code is Data::Dumper.

Sample code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my @array = split(/\,/, 'nick,1,2,,56,88');
print Dumper \@array, scalar @array;

__END__

$ perl sample.pl
$VAR1 = [
          'nick',
          '1',
          '2',
          '',
          '56',
          '88'
        ];
$VAR2 = 6;
[download]

Hope this helps, BR.

If I recall correctly, the split function should only remove missing values from the end of your input string:

$ perl -e 'print scalar(split /,/,"1,2,3,4")'
4
$ perl -e 'print scalar(split /,/,",2,3,4")'
4
$ perl -e 'print scalar(split /,/,"1,,3,4")'
4
$ perl -e 'print scalar(split /,/,"1,2,,4")'
4
$ perl -e 'print scalar(split /,/,"1,2,3,")'
3
$ perl -e 'print scalar(split /,/,"1,2,,")'
2
[download]

You'd best check perldoc -f split to see what it does in detail.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

Hi all, thank you for your answers. I am maybe doing something else wrong then, I will double-check!