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From: bjaspan@athena.mit.edu (Barr3y Jaspan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Split question
Message-ID: <1991Feb27.185226.7279@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 27 Feb 91 18:52:26 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: bjaspan@athena.mit.edu
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 22


I started off with the goal of splitting a string on whitespace
without breaking quoted strings and ended up coming across the
following split behavior that I do not understand.  This script

print "$]\n";
@_ = split(/ *(0[^0]+0) *| /, '0foo bar0 baz frob 0la la la0 quux');
print join(', ', @_),"\n";

produces the following output:

$Header: perly.c,v 3.0.1.9 90/11/10 01:53:26 lwall Locked $
Patch level: 41
, 0foo bar0, baz, , frob, 0la la la0, quux

(Think of 0 as a quotation mark and it will make more sense.  I didn't
want to deal with escaping ".)  Why is there a null entry between
baz and frob in the returned array?

Thanks.

Barr3y