Re: Split ( ) is Giving Me a Splitting Headache

In addition to the good answers you already got, which I recommend you to read carefully to understand what's going on, you can get what you want with a syntax similar to yours with a slight abuse of map:

my @Parts = map split, $Phrase;
[download]

I recommend that you do not cargo-cult this usage though, and postpone adopting it to when you will understand exactly what's going on in it too. Also because this doesn't really buy you anything that split basic usage as in rhesa's example won't.

While we're there, one more warning: you must have noticed that people here suggested using a string contining a single space as a first argument. Notice that this is a special case, which is supposed to what you want - because it's in fact what often people want, which in turn is the reason why it's the default. But in general split expects a proper pattern as a first argument. If you give it a string, then it will be automatically converted. It is generally recommended that you use a real pattern instead.

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Re^2: Split ( ) is Giving Me a Splitting Headache by dsheroh (Monsignor) on May 24, 2006 at 15:01 UTC
What's the reasoning behind that general recommendation? From your description, it appears that splitting on 'foo' and /foo/ (or even on $bar, if $bar eq 'foo') would be equivalent, so why prefer the pattern version? (My current practice is to use 'foo' on the principle of never using regexes where a simple comparison is sufficient. On the surface, at least, it seems that splitting on /foo/ is the same manner of overkill as using `if $bar =~ /^foo$/` instead of `if $bar eq 'foo'`.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Split ( ) is Giving Me a Splitting Headache by blazar (Canon) on May 25, 2006 at 11:01 UTC
What's the reasoning behind that general recommendation? From your description, it appears that splitting on 'foo' and /foo/ (or even on $bar, if $bar eq 'foo') would be equivalent, so why prefer the pattern version? Because the documentation says `split /PATTERN/,EXPR,LIMIT split /PATTERN/,EXPR split /PATTERN/ split` [download] In fact splitting on 'foo' and /foo/ are (currently) equivalent because perl converts the string to a regex: `perl -MO=Deparse -ne 'split "foo"' LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) { split(/foo/, $_, 0); } -e syntax OK` [download] Who knows? I doubt it, but the docs do not specify what should happen with generic strings other than `' '` and maybe one day special behaviour may be implemented for them along the lines of what is currently available for `' '`. (My current practice is to use 'foo' on the principle of never using regexes where a simple comparison is sufficient. On the surface, at least, it seems that splitting on /foo/ is the same manner of overkill as using if $bar =~ /^foo$/ instead of if $bar eq 'foo'.) Your principle is based on an assumption that is simply not true for as we've seen before, your string is converted to a regex anyway. And OTOH matches like `/foo/` are internally optimized to basically do an index. So no overkill. If you don't trust me, just trust B::Concise: `$ perl -MO=Concise -pe '$_=split "foo"' >1.txt -e syntax OK $ perl -MO=Concise -pe '$_=split /foo/' >2.txt -e syntax OK $ diff [12].txt 20c20 < 6 </> pushre(/"foo"/) s/64 ->7 --- > 6 </> pushre(/"foo"/) s/64 ->7` [download] Notice that the only difference is an asterisk, which means "Do something weird for this op". I'm not saying that I don't agree with you on the `$bar =~ /^foo$/` vs. `$bar eq 'foo'` issue. Because I do agree. (Also because they're not strictly equivalent: `$ perl -le 'print "bar\n" =~ /^bar$/ ? "ok" : "not ok"' ok` [download] and people happen to use the former whereas they really want the latter.) Simply, that's not the same for split's first argument*.	[reply] [d/l] [select]