[MacPerl] split() trivia

["Sean M. Burke" <sean@misinc.net>]

Vicki Brown wrote:
> 
> At 11:32 -0600 98/06/16, Sean M. Burke wrote:
> > MacPerl coda, as it wasn't relevant), in the past month I've learned not
> > one, but TWO scary and obscure things about the functionality of
> > split().
> 
> I don't care if they aren't Mac-specific (but you already knew that :-)...
> 
> Don't leave us hanging!  What are they??!!
What I learned, I could have found out in these bits of the perlfunc
docs:

Perldoc wrote:
>[...]If LIMIT is unspecified, trailing null fields are stripped
>[...]If LIMIT is negative, it is treated as if an arbitrarily large
>LIMIT had been specified.

But, not knowing any of this, what sent me to #perl was that
split(":", ":foo:::") was giving me ('', 'foo'), which I considered
Wrong.   It turns out what I needed was split(":", ":foo:::", -1).
(Whether the language is Wrong for having this "trailing null fields
are stripped" proviso is a matter of aesthetics.)

And I was demonstrating what I thought was wrong by saying what
print scalar(split(":", ":foo:::")) was printing, which set someone off
saying that split in a scalar context is deprecated, which sent me to
the docs to discover:

>If not in a list context, returns the number of fields found and
                           ^^^ this I expected as normal coercion
>splits into the @_ array.
                 ^^^ this was news to me.

>(In a list context, you can force the split
>into @_ by using ?? as the pattern delimiters, but it still returns
>the array value.)  The use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated,
>however.
Cruft cruft cruft.

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