[ruby-core:38642] [Ruby 1.9 - Feature #5120] String#split needs to be logical

Issue #5120 has been updated by Kirill Radzikhovskyy.


Hi,
I also find this behavior confusing 
mainly because:

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :001 > 'a,b,,'.split ','
 => ["a", "b"] 
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :002 > ',,a,b'.split ','
 => ["", "", "a", "b"] 

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Feature #5120: String#split needs to be logical
http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/5120

Author: Alexey Muranov
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: 
Category: 
Target version: 


I would call this a bug, but i am new to Ruby, so i report this as a feature request.

Here are examples showing a surprising and inconsistent behavior of String#split method:

"aa".split('a')  # => []
"aab".split('a')  # => ["", "", "b"]

"aaa".split('aa')  # => ["", "a"] 
"aaaa".split('aa')  # => []
"aaaaa".split('aa')  # => ["", "", "a"] 

"".split('')  # => []
"a".split('')  # => ["a"]

What is the definition of *split*?
In my opinion, there should be given a simple one that would make it clear what to expect.
For example:

  str1.split(str2) returns a maximal array of non-empty substrings of str1 which can be concatenated with copies of str2 to form str1.

Additional precisions can be made to this definition to make clear what to expect as the result of "baaab".split("aa").

Thanks for attention.


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