pass me another split, sergeant, this one's elfed

[perlmonger]

[Poll #1119627]

[ ETA that this is an abstract question, not an invitation for a language war, though go ahead and have one if you must ]

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

The usual answer is an array of a single empty string, but I've never liked this and prefer the empty array.

Python naturally does both, as this is the most confusing behaviour possible. It only makes sense in Sanskrit, under particular phases of the moon. If you specify the toke, it returns an array of one empty string. If you _don't_ specify the token, then it does "default-based splitting" and looks for a normalised sequence of a set of the usual whitespace characters. BUT it also changes its empty string behavour so that it then returns an empty array instead!

[spride.livejournal.com]

This is why people hate Python.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Perl does the Right Thing IMO, which is to answer an edge case with the equivalent, and usually appropriate, edge case.

I can't get along with Python; too elegant for its own good, and significant leading whitespace makes me think of makefiles and sendmail. And COBOL.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Python is wonderfully elegant, which unfortunately is elegance in implementing the language, not using the bastard.

Strings return True if you test them with issequence() (i.e. "Is this some soprt of array I'm looking at). Yes, they are a sequence, in terms of "Do they support the iterator functions", but this also means it's hard to tell whether the parameter you've just been passed in single or multi-valued (Duck-typing Parseltongues do this sort of thing a lot). Did I receive one string or an array of many? Can't tell.