Question

I have a few lines of text that I’m trying to use Perl’s split function to convert into an array. The problem is that I’m getting some unusual extra characters in the output, specifically the following string “\cM” (without the quotes). This string appears where there were line breaks in the original text; however, (I believe) those line breaks were removed in the text that I’m trying to split. Does anybody know what’s going on with this phenomenon? I posted an example below. Thanks.

Here’s the original plain text that I’m trying to split. I’m loading it from a file, in case that matters:

10b2obo12b2o2b$6b3obob3o8bob3o2b$2bobo10bo3b2obo4bo2b$2o4b2o5bo3b4obo
3b2o2b$2bob2o2bo4b3obo5b4obob$8bo4bo13b3o$2bob2o2bo4b3obo5b4obob$2o4b
2o5bo3b4obo3b2o2b$2bobo10bo3b2obo4bo2b$6b3obob3o8bob3o2b$10b2obo12b2o!

Here is my Perl code that is supposed to do the splitting:

while(<$FH>) {
    chomp;
    $string .= $_;
    last if m/!$/;
}

@rows = split(qr/\$/, $string);
print;          # a dummy line to provide a breakpoint for the debugger

This what the debugger outputs when it gets to the “print” line. The issue I’m trying to deal with appears in lines 3, 7, and 10:

DB<10> p $string
2o5bo3b4obo3b2o2b$2bobo10bo3b2obo4bo2b$6b3obob3o8bob3o2b$10b2obo12b2o!
DB<11> x @rows
0  '10b2obo12b2o2b'
1  '6b3obob3o8bob3o2b'
2  '2bobo10bo3b2obo4bo2b'
3  "2o4b2o5bo3b4obo\cM3b2o2b"
4  '2bob2o2bo4b3obo5b4obob'
5  '8bo4bo13b3o'
6  '2bob2o2bo4b3obo5b4obob'
7  "2o4b\cM2o5bo3b4obo3b2o2b"
8  '2bobo10bo3b2obo4bo2b'
9  '6b3obob3o8bob3o2b'
10  "10b2obo12b2o!\cM"

Answer 1

You know, changing the file input separator would make this code a lot simpler.

$/ = '$';

my @rows = <$FH>;
chomp @rows;

print "@rows";