For some reason, I'm having a bit of trouble with this one. I just want to find out the easy way to calculate the number of bits of stuff that split will return, preferably without actually returning them or coughing up the following complaint:
Use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated at Foo.pm line XIV.
Here's a bit of code that causes that particular problem:
my $foo = split (/,/, $bar);
It would seem that since the split() call is being assigned to something that the default behaviour would not kick in, yet this is clearly not the case.

One way around this is to avoid that function and use only the required regex, which seems to Benchmark at least 5 times faster than any equivalent split:
my $foo = ($bar =~ /,/) + 1;
Yet this is only an approximation, considering it erroneously returns 1 when $bar is empty. So, more formally:
my $foo = defined($bar) && length($bar) && (($bar =~ /,/) + 1);
Yet, this does seem to be going to quite the trouble just to get a simple answer.

Any ideas?

In reply to Idiomatic Split to Scalar Conversion by tadman

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.