$delimiter = '|';
$delimiter = quotemeta $delimiter;
@list = split /$delimiter/ , $line;
[download]

Update:
Of course this is overkill - you could just escape it with a backslash. It just demonstrates how you would escape all metacharacters if they were not known ahead of time.

Of course this is overkill - you could just escape it with a backslash.

I don't think it's overkill. Look carefully at the OP's code. If you'd told him just to back-whack his pipe, he probably would've repsonded with "that didn't work either" because he probably would have done $delimiter = "\|";

I think your response was just perfect. If only I'd hit the "create" button on my reply immediately rather than doing Real Work instead I'd've been first! Now I'm just lost in the shuffle ;-)

duff

Yes, If I knew it ahead of time, this would be overkill.
But, your idea worked like a charm.

Thanks much!

This seems to work:

use Data::Dumper;

$line = "foo|bar";
$delimiter = '\|';
@list = split($delimiter, $line);

print Dumper @list;
[download]

Producing this output:

$VAR1 = 'foo';
$VAR2 = 'bar';
[download]

It's helpful to remember that the first parameter to split will always be treated as a regular expression (with the one exception of " "). Variables work fine in regular expressions and are expanded before the expression is evaluated, so your code boils down to @list = split "|", $line;. Since the pipe symbol (|) is special in regular expressions, you need to escape it. This is typically done with quotemeta

The pattern is a regular expression pattern. ;)

have a look at perldoc -f split (split) and perlre.

Update Sat Jan 31 05:05:13 2004: Added slashes. I saw that particular syntax on comp.lang.perl.misc, and just assumed that it would work (mea maxima culpa).

split \|, $line;

Huh? Try:  split /\|/, $line;

You forgot your quote-like regexp characters.

Or to answer the OP's question:

my $delimiter = quotemeta( '|' );
my @array = split /$delimiter/, $line;
[download]




Dave