At 10:48 AM 4/25/2001, you wrote:
>Thanks for that Steven,
>
>I knew it was obvious
>
>Gary
Well, it's not obvious. To tell you honestly, I was initially shocked that
split didn't complain about the string, demanding a pattern instead. Then
I looked more at and played a bit, and found the Perl coerces the string
into becoming a pattern.
If you have a recent Perl, run your script like this:
perl -MO=Deparse myscript.pl <args>
The output from Deparse will show you what Perl really thought of your
script, after the compilation phase is done. If you'll look, you see that
your
split (".", $ARGV[0])
becomes
split (/./, $ARGV[0], 5)
I don't know what the 5 is doing there ( I think it should be a 4, because
you are assigning the result of the split to 4 a list of variables, but the
compiler knows about many things that I don't.) but you can see what
happens. The string is made into a pattern, and since that pattern is a
single dot, it matches everything in the string, so there's nothing to
split on, so you get nothing back, and as it is, your variables stay empty.
Wow. That was a cool one. Thanks! : )
Oh, BTW, check out perlrun for info on running modules form the command
line (like the -MO=Deparse above) and perlfunc for all of the info about split.
There is an interesting note about a special case with split when the
argument is a string with a single space, but that doesn't apply here.
Thank you for your time,
Sean.
