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From: victor@watson.ibm.com (Victor Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Question about split
Message-ID: <VICTOR.91May28141138@irt.watson.ibm.com>
Date: 28 May 91 21:11:38 GMT
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I'm a little confused about perl's behavior in split.  If you run (on
4.003) then code below

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

#Test how certain patterns split
sub test {
    ($a) = @_;
    @a = split(/:/,$a);
    print "split('$a')=(",join(',',@a),") count=",scalar(@a),"\n";
}

&test('a:b:c: ');
&test('a:b:c:');
&test('a:b:c');
#end of program


You get the results:

split('a:b:c: ')=(a,b,c, ) count=4
split('a:b:c:')=(a,b,c) count=3
split('a:b:c')=(a,b,c) count=3

Which I find a little counter-intuitive: I thought that perl should
distinguish between the second and third cases.  I would have thought
that the output of the second case should have been

split('a:b:c:')=(a,b,c,) count=4

Why is it done the way that it is?
--
			Victor S. Miller
			Vnet and Bitnet:  VICTOR at WATSON
			Internet: victor@watson.ibm.com
			IBM, TJ Watson Research Center