Answer: How can I split without getting null fields from Whitespace?

Split automatically saves anything in parentheses into the output list. This is so that a split like this:

split /([,-])/, "1,10-20"
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Will produce output like this:

"1", ",", "10", "-", "20"
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I believe this is a mis-feature, but we get to live with it. Since split only saves values that get stored into $1 and kin, you can stop this behavior by not saving anything in those special variables. Either omit the paranthesis if unnecessary, or use the (?: ... ) format, which doesn't save any values into $1.

-Ted

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Re: Answer: How can I split without getting null fields from Whitespace? by chipmunk (Parson) on Dec 09, 2000 at 02:48 UTC
How could that be a misfeature? You said yourself, if you don't want the delimiters to be saved, don't use capturing parentheses. Very simple.	[reply]