As my esteemed colleagues have pointed out, the LIMIT argument for split doesn't truncate tokens whose indices are greater than LIMIT, merely lumps them together as the last return value. Think of it like this: split EXPR on PATTERN into a list LIMIT elements long. 
my $string = 'see:how:they:code';
my($zeroth, $first, $remainder) = split ':', $string, 3;
print $zeroth, "\n",    # see
      $first, "\n",     # how
      $remainder, "\n"; # they:code

[download]

If you want to actually truncate the leftover list elements, try this:</o> 

my($zeroth, $first, $second) = (split ':', $string)[0..2];
print $zeroth, "\n",   # see
      $first, "\n",    # how
      $second, "\n";   # they

[download]

And 'code' just goes away. Just watch your parens, because this is wrong:

split(':', $string)[0..2]

Hopefully you can see why.

In reply to (take two...) Re: A split ing headache by mwp
in thread A split ing headache by MeowChow

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