[ruby-core:39470] Re: [Ruby 1.9 - Feature #5120] String#split needs to be logical

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 1:49 PM, Alexey Muranov
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> 2. a separate method for getting the array of letters (#letters?) should =
be implemented, split on the empty string should raise an error
> (or otherwise it should always return the empty string as the first and t=
he last elements: "a".split("") =C2=A0# =3D> ["", "a", ""] by analogy with =
=C2=A0"a".split("a") =C2=A0# =3D> ["", ""] in the proposed implementation, =
but this is not very practical).
>

str.split("") already gets you the array of "letters" (as does
str.chars.to_a), but since you feel that str.split("") should raise an
error or have another return value, do you think str.split("") should
break existing code which uses split("") to get characters?

What's the reasoning behind str.split("") raising an error? I can't
see a good reason for it. Equally, I can see no good reason for
treating "a".split("") the same in return value as "a".split("a"). In
the latter, there is more to be considered because the receiver itself
contains "a". Why should "a".split("") return ["", "a", ""]?