Re: split giving me a splitting headache

in reply to split giving me a splitting headache

Why is this only returning x.z in $first and nothing in $second?

Because split consumes what you are splitting on, and you are splitting on .y in your test case. However,

If the PATTERN contains capturing groups, then for each separator, an additional field is produced for each substring captured by a group (in the order in which the groups are specified

so you could do <contrived>

my $str = "x.z.y";
my ($first,$second) = split(/\.([^.]*)$/,$str);
[download]

</contrived> Other alternatives include split, pop and join; toolic's regex (what I'd actually do); or even reverse, index and substr. Good times.

#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom