So the idea is that you will put your string to be 'parsed' into a scalar variable, say, for example, $string. You will then assign the output of split to a list.

If I were splitting a string containing numbers seperated by whitespace, I might do this:

my $string = "1 3 5 7 11 13";
my @numbers = split /\s+/, $string;
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Now @numbers is an array holding six elements, each element containing one number.

You don't have to split into an array though. You can split such that the return value is used to populate 'foreach' with data to iterate over. My previous example might look like this:

my $string = "1 3 5 7 11 13";
foreach my $number ( split /\s+/, $string ) {
    # Do some stuff with $number.
    # Number will contain one number from the list each time
    # through the loop.
}
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I don't understand. my ($this, $that) = split(/,/, $string); how is this an array? I had to create my variables before my split.

Thanks.

Split returns a list. What you do with that list is up to you. Some of the options are, you can assign that list to an array, or you can assign it into a list of scalar variables. Your example does the latter. You're assigning the output of split into two scalars.

I wouldn't do it that way. The problem is that you can't be sure that there will only be two fields. You're better off assigning into an array, since arrays can hold zero to darn-near-infinite number of items.




Dave

I don't understand. my ($this, $that) = split(/,/, $string); how is this an array? I had to create my variables before my split.

Ah, but in perl, arrays are a single variable that can hold a dynamic number of values! So you don't need to know beforehand how many values will result from the split; you can just do:

  my @words = split /,/, $string;
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Then, to figure out how many words resulted, you can just use @words in a scalar context:

  # find out information about the entire array
  print "found " . scalar( @words ) . " words\n";

  # do stuff with each member of the array
  foreach my $word ( @words ) { print "  word: $word\n"; }
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