From: Mark Hubbart <discordantus@...>
Date: 2004-10-10T13:54:46+09:00
Subject: Re: split with negative limit

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 13:18:48 +0900, trans.  (T. Onoma)
<transami@runbox.com> wrote:
> Word o' warning. I just put this comment in a program:
> 
>   lines = self.split("\n",-1)  # boy oh boy was that -1 a pain to figure out!

???

  str = "one\n\ntwo\n\nthree"
    ==>"one\n\ntwo\n\nthree"
  str.split("\n")
    ==>["one", "", "two", "", "three"]
  str.split("\n",-1)
    ==>["one", "", "two", "", "three"]
  RUBY_VERSION
    ==>"1.9.0"

What did you gain by adding the -1 in? I tried this same thing using
ruby 1.6.8, got the same results.

Null field filtering is normally only done when no arguments are
passed, or with the special case " " argument.

> 
> All told I probably wasted half of my day trying to figure this out because it
> was causing another part of the program to act oddly (which I still don't
> quite get but nonetheless), thus digusing the real issue.
> 
> This is VERY unintuitive. The value itself doesn't even /do/ anything when the
> limit is negative. Moreover, is the default of supressing null fields really
> best? Recommend improvement something like:
> 
>   def split( pattern=$; , supres_null=false , limit=nil )
> 
> No negative number trick.
> 
> Thanks,
> T.
> 
>