Many built-in functions accept a regex pattern as an argument. Furthermore, any subroutine can accept a string yet treat it as a regex pattern. This could be done, for example, by passing the string to the match operator (m//). Because regex patterns are encoded as regular strings, it is tempting to assume that a string literal will be treated as if a regex that matched only that string literal were supplied. Unexpected function behavior can result if the string contains characters that have special meanings when the string is treated as a regex pattern. Therefore, do not pass strings that are not clearly regex patterns to a function that takes a regex.
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But the first argument to split() is treated as a regex pattern. Because $ indicates the end of the string, no splitting ever occurs.
Compliant Solution
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| Code Block | ||||
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my $data = 'Tom$Dick$Harry'; my @names = split( m/\$/, $data); |
Exceptions
STR31-PL-EX0: A string literal may be passed to a function if it normally takes a regex pattern but provides special behavior for that string. For example, the perlfunc manpage [Wall 2011] says, regarding PATTERN, the first argument to split():
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Tool | Diagnostic |
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Perl::Critic | BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitStringySplit |
Bibliography
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