If you really want a lazy list, could you just use an iterator? The following will return the individual characters, but only as you need them. Further, it won't do a split, but it does reverse the string internally, so a very long string may be an issue. I just hacked it together to demonstrate one strategy. It could use some clean up.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

sub NEXT { $_[0]->() }

sub string_to_char_iter {
    my $string = shift;
    $string = reverse $string;
    sub { '' ne $string ? chop $string : undef }
}

my $string = join '', 'a' .. 'z';
my $iter   = string_to_char_iter $string;

while ( defined ( my $char = NEXT $iter ) ) {
    print "$char\n";
}

[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: Just in case it's not clear, this was just some demo code. Obviously, for a string of 26 characters, creating an iterator would be overkill. Iterators are going to be more useful if you have a large amount of data that is difficult to fit into memory, such as reading from a file, or if you need to keep track of where you are in your data while reading it.

Oh, and I tweaked the code just a hair.

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

In reply to Re: Are strings lists of characters? by Ovid
in thread Are strings lists of characters? by John M. Dlugosz

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.