I would seriously recommend abandoning using split for what you are doing here. Although it's possible to use split to achieve your immediate needs, it will become hard to enhance the syntax, later on.

What you are doing here is designing a grammar for boolean expressions. Have you thought about operator precedence? Which is higher, AND or OR? Can you parenthesise the expression if you want to override the precedence?

Parse::RecDescent is your friend here. Grammars might appear frighening to the uninitiated at first, but they are not that difficult, and are very powerful and flexible.

You could use regexp captures to pick up your tokens from the string, but before long, the regexp will be come unwieldy, almost as much as split. And you will have to do much processing afterwards to decode the results of the pattern match.

My $0.02th for what it's worth

--

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My friends all rate Windows, I must disagree.
Your powers of persuasion will set them all free,
So oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
(Missquoting Janis Joplin)

In reply to Re: using split by rinceWind
in thread using split by rsiedl

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