That would be 0xB5, yes. I have no idea how one arrives at using that as a separator though..

If there are one or more spaces between fields, but none inside fields, then /\s+/ is indeed what you want to use and probably better than ' ' which is a special case. It means almost the same as /\s+/ - with a subtle difference.

#!/usr/bin/perl -wl
use strict;

sub joinprint { print join " ", map q/"$_"/, @_ }

$_ = " blah blah";

joinprint split ' ';
joinprint split /\s+/;

__END__
"blah" "blah"
"" "blah" "blah"
[download]

The split " " will omit an empty initial field. perldoc -f split carefully points this out. I recommend you write split /$char/ in the future, since that's what really happens to all literal strings other than the single blank. If you don't, you can easily confuse yourself with something like split "." which is the same as split /./ and as such most certainly not what you wanted.

Makeshifts last the longest.