I have a line from a file that looks like

directive thing1 thing2

where thing2 is optional and defaults to thing1. I'm currently doing

my ($first, $second) = [(split)[1,-1]];
$second = $first unless defined $second;

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I had been hoping that the slice would always give me 2 values, even if they were from the same aray element, but no such luck. Does anyone have a better way of doing this?

Thanks,
Ira

"So... What do all these little arrows mean?"
~unknown

In reply to split'ing lines with variable number of fields by IraTarball

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