Re^2: Matching dot using regexp

[AnomalousMonk]

<pedantic>
The regular expression that follows in the OP is  /./ in the split expression. And FWIW, it could, indeed, be a string literal:

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -le
"my $tim = '01:00:01.004';
 ;;
 $tim =~ s/:/./g;
 print qq{new time is '$tim'};
 my @outputlist = split '\.', $tim;
 dd \@outputlist;
"
new time is '01.00.01.004'
["01", "00", "01", "004"]

</pedantic>

[LanX]

If it was a string literal why do you need to escape the dot?

I read thru split couldn't find a a mention of strings as separators.

From my knowledge using a delimiter in single quotes is still a regex, albeit without variable interpolation like in double quotes.

UPDATE

After reading the dialog it seems that what you meant, a literal string without interpolation used as regex.

[soonix]

Somewhere in the middle of that doc it says that PATTERN can be

a string composed of a single space character (such as ' ' or "\x20" , but not e.g. / / ).

However, the only PATTERN strings that I find there are whitespace (PATTERN defaults to " " if omitted) and the empty string.

[AnomalousMonk]

split is happy with any string (or anything that can be converted to a string) as a /PATTERN/, e.g.,

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -le
"my $tim = '10:00:10.004';
 ;;
 my @outputlist = split '[:.]', $tim;
 dd \@outputlist;
 ;;
 my $p = 10;
 @outputlist = split $p, $tim;
 dd \@outputlist;
"
[10, "00", 10, "004"]

["", ":00:", ".004"]

However, I would incline to use  // qr// m// for any but the most simple and straightforward patterns; I vaguely recall pitfalls involving backslashes.

[AnomalousMonk]

Well... I don't quite understand the point you're making, but...

If it was a string literal why do you need to escape the dot? ... strings as separators.

In my understanding, a string (or anything that's not a  Regexp object) supplied as a  /PATTERN/ to split will be compiled to a regex, so a single- or double-quoted dot has meta-nature and must be meta-escaped to match only a period.

[Anonymous Monk]

Heh slow days and i draws the ijits. Regular expressions are not english or chinese they're regex. No matter qr// or qr'' or qr"" whats inside is a different language it aint a plain string