I haven't tried your more exotic version, but if you remove the limit cnt from my simple code, you still get the empty string...
Actually, that's the first thing I tried after it didn't 'work', given that my data only has var=val (if there is a val to get)

In reply to Re^2: undef vs empty string '' from split by chrism01
in thread undef vs empty string '' from split by chrism01

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