splitting a string

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks,

I am not able to split a string correctly.

The string is as follows:
my $string = "/home/source::::::::DATE:SUBJECT:NAME::::::";
If i use a the following code i am but able to split it correctly.
my @array = split(":",$string);
There are only 11 elements in the array.

But there are 16 semicolons in that string.

So there should be 16 elements in that array.

When i print the array i am not getting the empty spaces after the value "NAME" in the string.

Can any one help me on this???

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Re: splitting a string by graff (Chancellor) on Dec 04, 2008 at 07:17 UTC
As described in the docs for split, there's an optional 3rd arg, which says how many elements you want returned; "-1" returns all possible, even those that happen to be empty strings after the last non-empty element. (Default is to truncate the return list after the last non-empty element.)	[reply]
Re: splitting a string by prasadbabu (Prior) on Dec 04, 2008 at 07:27 UTC
Hi, From split doc, "Empty trailing fields, on the other hand, are produced when there is a match at the end of the string (and when LIMIT is given and is not 0), regardless of the length of the match". `use strict; use warnings; my $string = "/home/source::::::::DATE:SUBJECT:NAME::::::"; my @array = split(/:/,$string, -1); $" = '><'; print "<@array>\n"; print scalar(@array); output: ------- </home/source><><><><><><><><DATE><SUBJECT><NAME><><><><><><> 17` [download] Prasad	[reply] [d/l]
Re: splitting a string by lakshmananindia (Chaplain) on Dec 04, 2008 at 09:47 UTC
From the perldoc documentation, if the LIMIT (3rd Argument) is unspecified or zero, trailing null fields are stripped off. If you don't want that then pass the LIMIT as -1.	[reply]


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