I have a question based on some examples in my very basic Perl book, which, I must admit, is "Perl for Dummies." (I know, I know, I'm going to buy the Llama as soon as my paycheck clears!) I'm quoting here directly from the book:
The split function does not normally return the delimiters in list items. You can use parentheses in your regular expression and split returns whatever is in the parentheses as items in the list....For example, when you run the following program, in which the | delimiter is enclosed in parentheses, 
$TheRecord="Serling|Rod|Twilight Zone|";
@TheFields=split (/(\|)/, $TheRecord);

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Perl returns 
('Serling', '|', 'Rod', '|', 'Twilight Zone', '|')

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You can supress your desire to have the delimiters returned by using the (?: extension to regular expressions. For example, given the following statements, 
$TheRecord="Serling|Rod|Twilight Zone|";
@TheFields=split(/(?:\|)/, $TheRecord);

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Perl returns 
('Serling', 'Rod', 'Twilight Zone')

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It seems to me that the second program is just a longer-winded way to return exactly the same results as you'd get if you used 
@TheFields=split(/\|/, $TheRecord);

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Is there a difference I'm not perceiving? And if so, why would the longer-winded version be used?

In reply to using split delimiters by amarceluk

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