It's not really a special exception, the first argument to split() is a regular expression, irrespective of what the delimiters are, the only special case there being the difference between / / and ' '.

/J\

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $string = "Bla\nBlo\nBloe";
print join("|", split('something', $string));
[download]

~$ perl -MO=Deparse split.pl 
my $string = "Bla\nBlo\nBloe";
print join('|', split(/something/, $string, 0));
split.pl syntax OK
[download]

Arjen