Well, yeah, += doesn't do that. += doesn't multiple the right hand side with the left hand side either.

You're the second person to assume something needs to be concatenated. Why, I have no idea. split doesn't return a string, it returns a number, and the program is counting things. I see no reason at all to come up with concatenation.

To answer the question, split returns the number of fields. And if you split on [ \t]*, the number of fields isn't necessaryly the same as the number of characters.

Abigail