That certainly is the right way to go... and cheap at the price. ++!

Some minor quibbles though:

  1. OP offers no indication of actually having double spaces between sentences but that is a not uncommon occurance, which is why your observation is so valuable: Put two spaces rather than one in "...field. This..." in my __DATA__ and my split pattern does NOT DWIM) whereas yours does.
  2. The sample I used, from the OP, has no doubled spaces.
  3. Whether or not the db's text field has doubled spaces depends on how it was created. If it was simply scraped from a webpage, odds are that it has none, since browsers (and I believe, browser-substitutes) do not render but one in any string of literal whitespaces (character entities are, of course, a differnt matter).

For some reason, your "...unless the empty string between two spaces counts as a word." does not parse to anything plausible (possible blind spot?) for me. FMI, is there a way to persuade split to treat the empty string between two spaces as a word boundary (\b) or a not_word boundary (\B)?

Update: Oversight addendum: "the empty string between two spaces" is a position (despite cf perldoc -f split at "As a special case for "split", using the empty pattern "//"....")

In reply to Re^3: Truncate Data from MySQL by ww
in thread Truncate Data from MySQL by rich731

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