Splitting on Variable

Angel has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Trying to split a string on a user defined object scalar. This way depending on the delinter for the file you can parse the flat file into columns

#read in first line which should contain fieldnames
        
$field_line = <FILE>;
        
chomp $field_line;
    
@field_list = split( /$self->{delimiter}/, $field_line);
[download]

I get the same affect as calling split with // as the first argument. Any ideas?

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Re: Splitting on Variable by tye (Sage) on May 21, 2003 at 22:35 UTC
I prefer to use \Q$var\E in regular expressions when I want to treat the variable's contents as a string (not interpret it is a regular expression). So I'd write: `@field_list = split /\Q$self->{delimiter}\E/, $field_line, -1;` [download] but you could also use quotemeta or structure it in several different ways. I'll take a guess that your delimiter is "\|". - tye	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Splitting on Variable by halley (Prior) on May 21, 2003 at 20:40 UTC
If situation /$blahblah/ acts just like //, then $blahblah is probably undefined or otherwise empty. `print STDERR "My delimiter is [$self->{delimiter}].\n";` [download] -- `[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Splitting on Variable by graff (Chancellor) on May 22, 2003 at 05:51 UTC
If the user-specified delimiter is expected to always be a single character, then you might want to refer to this excellent node by tilly, his "Text:xSV" module, which does this sort of thing very nicely. (On the other hand, if delimiters could include things like "::" or "\s+//\s+", etc, and you're confident that you don't need to worry about embedded/escaped occurrences of the delimiter pattern within data fields, then just make sure that $self->{delimiter} is defined and non-empty, and proceed with your own solution...)	[reply]