It does. However because the . matches anything, the result may not be what you expect: all the chars are delimiter chars so no fields are found.

Just to expand on this theme a bit, you can get those empty fields returned if you really want them, by passing -1 as the third argument to split: split /./,'abcde',-1 will dutifully return six empty strings. (Cases with values other than -1 are left as an exercise to the extremely bored.) Of course, there are probably faster ways to count the characters in your string, but that's a side issue. :-)




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If God had meant us to fly, he would *never* have given us the railroads.
    --Michael Flanders

split returns only the string segments between, but not including the matching chars. For example:

my @list = split(/;/, 'one;two;three');
# @list is now ('one', 'two', 'three');
[download]

Since /./ matches on any char, what you end up with is essentially emptiness. The lookahead works because it is looking ahead, not "matching" in the same sense as /./. FYI: split(q//, $string); will split the string into chars, and is a little easier to understand (and possibly faster) than using /(?=.)/.

split returns only the string segments between, but not including the matching chars.

<nit>

Uhm, then what does this do?

my @list = split /([\W]+)/, 'one;two--three!!!';
[download]

Updated: Corrected '+' typo.

</nit>

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

Your pattern to split has capturing parentheses, which returns fields along w/ the delimiters; see perldoc -f split. Also, that [+] (mind you + here is just a plain plus sign) is useless as the string to be split lacks one.

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