Starting from the premise that a lame but almost working answer is better than none:


/(             #A nice simple capture, for
  [^|\{]+      #a block of nonsignificant chars
 |
  \{ [^}]+ \}  #or a bracketed block
 ) 
  \|           #followed by a pipe.
/x

[download]

Doesn't _quite_ work - produces the following on output:

$VAR1 = [
          '',
          'foo',
          '',
          '{baz|qux}',
          'fax'
        ];

[download]

This indicates my need for enlightenment - if I use (?:) instead of (), it returns just (' ',' ','fax'), not the captures... so maybe there's some deeper magic going on in split which I'm not clear on.

Update: Found why it's adding the captured elems, but not why using (?:) breaks it.

from split manpage:

If the PATTERN contains parentheses, additional list elements are crea
+ted 
from each matching substring in the delimiter.

[download]

Update again: Now I fool feelish. Okay, yup, like would make sense, split uses pre/postmatch stuff - the end result being that since (?:) is part of the match, it gets dropped, and since that's the content I'm looking for (the foo or {bar|baz} bit), I lose my content.

hm. now I'm as stumped as BUU. Can't use lookbehinds, cuz variable length lookbehinds aren't implemented... *falls into contemplative silence*.

But is that approximately what you're looking for?

In reply to Re: Split unless contained by by Ferret
in thread Split unless contained by by BUU

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