Sean M. Burke wrote:
>
> The current behavior makes trailing empty fields non-existent, and that's a
> bizarre and nonintuitive thing to have be a default;
Only to some people; and besides, it's well documented.
> if your code relies on
> them being removed, then remove them explicitly, without expecting split to
> do it for you /by default/ at the expense of all the people who would
> expect a saner and less surprising default.
> If you want trailing/leading/all nulls removed without having to type the
> single line of code it'd take to do it explicitly, then have that be an
> option to split; don't have it be a default.
I think it's an entirely fine default. If you want your "sane" behavior,
you have to do nothing more than
split /\s+/;
But if the default were changed as you suggest, then to get the
current (exremely useful) behavior, one has to do
@a = split /\s+/; # non-magical now, thanks. :-(
pop @a if @a && $a[-1] eq '';
shift @a if @a && $a[ 0] eq '';
I think the choice is obvious.
--
John Porter
By pressing down a special key It plays a little melody
