Perl: Split string by everything but whitespaces

Question

I want to split a string by everything but whitespaces.

Example:

Assume that I have a string:

"The    quick  brown fox    jumps over   the lazy dog"

I want to split it and get the following list of space-strings:

["    ", "  ", " ", "    ", " ", "   ", " ", " "]

Can you please show me how to do it?

Thanks!

hwnd · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-18T14:52:29.413

2

You can use \S to split by here which means match any non-white space character.

my @list = split /\S+/, $string;

Or better yet, just match your whitespace instead of having to split.

my @list = $string =~ /\s+/g;

edited May 18 '14 at 14:52

answered May 18 '14 at 14:29

hwnd

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This looks to be the best answer, especially since he beat me to the second option, which is probably the best. – vol7ron May 18 '14 at 14:46

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

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\S splits on any non-whitespace. However, if you want to include tabs and newlines, then you should use (single character space). More than likely what you want is the \S as hwnd has provided.

my $string = q{The    quick  brown fox    jumps over   the lazy dog};
my @values = split /[^ ]+/, $string;

edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

Community

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answered May 18 '14 at 14:31

vol7ron

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It returns empty list – SomethingSomething May 18 '14 at 14:34
It shouldn't, but I did forget the repetition `+` operator – vol7ron May 18 '14 at 14:40

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 18 '14 at 17:13

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why not just look for the spaces instead of splitting by non-space characters?
pattern = (\s+) Demo

answered May 18 '14 at 17:13

alpha bravo

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Perl: Split string by everything but whitespaces

3 Answers3