I think bladex may be referring to the split behavior many people forget about: by default it strips null fields off the end. So if one line is: one|two|three|four but the next is five|six|| then the first split gets a 4 element array, the second gets a two element array. This can cause problems if the application always wants 4 fields regardless. The way around that is to use the seldom used 3rd arrgument to split, LIMIT. If you know how many fields you'll always have, set it to that number. Otherwise set it to a negative value to always keep null fields in each split line. See the docs for details or I can elaborate further.

steves is right. I use split's LIMIT argument from time to time. It's quite handy.

This illustration prints each element on separate line, showing the nulls:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $item1 = "1,2,3,4,5";
my $item2 = "a,b,c,,";

my @split1 = split( /,/, $item1, 5);
my @split2 = split( /,/, $item2, 5);
# better yet, to set the size of the array at run-time...
# my @split2 = split( /,/, $item2, ($#split1 + 1));


print "item1 has " . ( $#split1 + 1) ." elements:\n";

foreach(@split1){
    print "'$_'\n";
}

print "\nitem2 has " . ( $#split2 + 1) ." elements\n";
foreach(@split2){
    print "'$_'\n";
}
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