From: mike@... (Mike Stok)
Date: 2003-06-26T23:35:50+09:00
Subject: Re: String#split(' ') and whitespace (perl user's surprise)

In article <200306260741.40418.wjl@icecavern.net>,
Wesley J Landaker  <wjl@icecavern.net> wrote:
>On Thursday 26 June 2003 6:14 am, Mike Stok wrote:
>
>> In irb:
>> >> '    A     50       3 for 130'.split(' ', 3)
>>
>> => ["A", "50", "      3 for 130"]
>>
>> What I'd like Ruby to do
>>
>> >> '    A     50       3 for 130'.split(' ', 3)
>>
>> => ["A", "50", "3 for 130"]
>
>I should have mentioned that as a workaround, you can do this:
>
>'    A     50       3 for 130'.split(' ', 3).map { |x| x.strip }
>
>I agree you shouldn't have to do that, but it will get you going with 
>minimal changes.

Thanks.  A minor nit is that this will destroy trailing spaces on the
third field (not relevant in this case, and maybe useful in many cases.
:-)

I think that my real point was that if there's a special case for
splitting a string on ' ' then it should behave the same way as Perl's
special case.

Mike

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