CODEWITHSUNDEEP
arraysruby-2.0
Nick Ellis
Nick Ellis

Reputation: 1077

Why do ruby split statements with space separators return different values?

For example these two lines which are identical other than separator return different arrays.

"1,2,,3,4,,".split(',')
=> ["1", "2", "", "3", "4"] 
"1 2  3 4  ".split(' ')
=> ["1", "2", "3", "4"]

Upvotes: 1

Views: 55

Answers (2)

Eric Terry
Eric Terry

Reputation: 364

Depending on what you are looking for, you can either pass in an empty string:

 '1 2  3 4  '.split( '' )
 # => ["1", " ", "2", " ", " ", "3", " ", "4", " ", " "]

Or use regex:

 '1 2  3 4  '.split( /\s/ )
 # => ["1", "2", "", "3", "4"]

Upvotes: 1

tompave
tompave

Reputation: 12412

Because a single whitespace passed to the method String#split has special meaning.

From the docs:

If pattern is a String, then its contents are used as the delimiter when splitting str. If pattern is a single space, str is split on whitespace, with leading whitespace and runs of contiguous whitespace characters ignored.

Upvotes: 1

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