I don't understand why you split on new lines here

I think that might be a clever way to chomp off the newlines without using, er, chomp. The tricky part that makes it really work is that split discards any empty elements at the end of the list. It's actually kind of a neat way to do this without an intermediary variable. Too bad the entire benefit of that is erased by the fact that it's kind of obfuscated. :-)