http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=592054


in reply to Understanding Split and Join

I'd put more emphasis on the fact that the first argument to split is always, always, always a regular expression (except for the one special case where it isn't :-). Too often do I see people write code like this:

@stuff = split "|", $string; # or worse ... $delim = "|"; @stuff = split $delim, $string;
And expect it to split on the pipe symbol because they have fooled themselves into thinking that the first argument is somehow interpreted as a string rather than a regular expression.