I wanted to split a string on | characters today and ran into a little bother. My first attempt looked like this:

which did not do what I expected so I tried:

which produced exactly the same result! My last attempt was:

which generated the result I was after. What is going on here? The perlfunc entry for split doesn't seem to help much.

use warnings;
use strict;

my $str = "lhs|rhs";

print join " ", split "|", $str;
print "\n" . join " ", split "\|", $str;
print "\n" . join " ", split "\\|", $str;

prints:

l h s | r h s
l h s | r h s
lhs rhs
[download]