I'm getting back to Perl after about a decade, so I am, at times, running into cluelessness issues. One I just had is some confusion with split. I have to process surnames, some of which contain hyphens or whitespace. If the name contains neither whitespace nor a hyphen, I want to change it to proper case (ucfirst(lc($_)), but if it's hyphenated or has embedded whitespace, I want to split it at either the hyphen or the whitespace, upcase each chunk, and rejoin it.

The way (doubtless close to pessimal) that I'm using right now is something like this: 

my $name = $record[0]; # it's being pulled from a roster written (for 
+some completely inane reason) in ALL CAPS)

if($name =~ /-| /) {
  my @temp = split(/(-| )/,$name) {
  ucfirst(lc($_)) foreach(@temp);
  $name='';
  $name =. $_ foreach(@temp);
}
else {
  $name = ucfirst(lc($name));
}

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I was expecting a name (say SMITH-JONES) to be divided into three pieces: "SMITH", "-", "JONES". This is not what happened: I got "S","","M","","I","","T","","H","-","J","","O","","N","","E","","S" What did I do wrong? The split's documentation seems to say that / / doesn't split between every character, but " " does.

Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc

In reply to Split confusion by swampyankee

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