I never suggested to use the character class to make split happy. split has nothing to do with - except that the problem illustrated itself with split. A character class was used to avoid using a backslash - as the behaviour of a backslash varies when "", '' and // is used - and might subsequent problems when strings are being interpolated in regular expressions.

When using character classes, you don't have to worry about the kind of quotes being used - or have to count how many backslashes you need.