Question

I have a sequence that looks like this:

my $seq = "D\IKLR\LK/Q";

what I want to do is to break the sequence into individual letter.

So I hope to get:

my $var = ['D', '\', 'I', 'K', 'L', 'R', '\', 'L', 'K','/' ,'Q'];

But why this does’nt do it:

 my @chars = split(//,$seq);
 print Dumper \@chars;

It gave this instead:

my $var = ['D', '\\', 'I', 'K', 'L', 'R', '\\', 'L', 'K', 'Q'];

What is the right way to do it?

Answer 1

What you are getting is exactly what you want.

The way to represent a single \ is '\\' and not '\' as you expected because the \ in '\' escapes the second ' making the string incomplete but the Data::Dumper return value can always be evaled as it’s Perl code.

But printing the individual elements of the array by say looping over it will print \.