-- Frag.
--
"Just remember what ol' Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says, "Give me your best shot. I can take it."

Many thanks. Some of the most obvious things are oftened over looked. Worked great! Chris

read Death to Dot Star! this should put you on the right track. i believe there are optional spaces before and after commas, no?

if you still need a hand, reply here with the code you've tried, and we'll have a look at it. good luck!

~Particle

Thanks. I'll take a look at it. The previous question you're referring to dealt with spaces after the coma, not between the colon and the first character. Sorry I didn't make that clearer. Chris

#! /usr/bin/perl -Tw

my ($label, $string);
$string = "a1:  a,b,c";
$string =~ s/\s+//g;  # $string = a1:a,b,c
($label, $string) = split(/:/,$string);
my @tokens = split(/,/,$string);
foreach (@tokens)
{
  print "$_\n";
}
[download]

However, you MIGHT also be asking exactly how to eliminate leading spaces. The '^' at the beginning of the regex points to the beginning of a line or string such that:

$string =~ s/^\s*//;

will get rid of leading spaces

$_="a1:   a, b, c, e";

my @tokens=split / +/;

for my $i (1..(scalar(@tokens)-1))
{
     print "\"$tokens[$i]\"\n";
}

"a,"
"b,"
"c,"
"d,"
"e"

metadoktor

"The doktor is in."

You may be over-complicating this:

my $s = "a1: a,b,c";

# instead of just a colon, first split on colon preceded
# or followed by optional whitespace
my ($prefix, $rest) = split /\s*:\s*/, $s;

# now, $prefix = "a1" and $rest = "a,b,c"

# now do the same for commas
my @rest = split /\s*,\s*/, $rest;

# now, @rest = ( 'a', 'b', 'c' )
[download]

Simple, symmetrical. Clean.

dmm