From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2004-12-10T03:51:43+09:00
Subject: Re: [rcr] String#split behaves odd

Hi,

From: "trans. (T. Onoma)" <transami@runbox.com>
> On Wednesday 08 December 2004 07:42 am, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> | On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 15:56:01 +0900, trans.  (T. Onoma)
> |
> | > Make default behavior -1.
> |
> | No. Most of the time, I don't actually *want* all the extra crap when
> | I split. This change would break a lot of code silently.
> 
> Really? In all my code I either had to put the -1 in b/c I was getting 
> unexpected results (wasting many hours, btw!); or it didn't really matter 
> either way --empty strings usually end up in no-effect results.
> 
> Might it break code? Sure. But a lot? I doubt it. In fact I suspect some of 
> those same programs might have edge cases that would break them for the lack 
> of the -1.

I'm pretty sure it would break a lot of my code.  I'm used to #split working
as it does since I came from Perl, but my point in saying that is not to bless
the way Perl did it, but that I am very careful about whether I want trailing
fields or not.

I haven't surveyed my code, but I'm pretty sure I rely on the precise behavior
of split. . .

FWIW,

Regards,

Bill