Question

I’d like to split a sentence into words and the parts between the words (I call them delimiters).

sentence = "First-tea,-then-coffee!"
=> "First-tea,-then-coffee!"
words = sentence.split(/\W+/) # Splits by non-word characters
=> ["First", "tea", "then", "coffee"]
delimiters = sentence.split(/\w+/) # Splits by word characters
=> ["", "-", ",-", "-", "!"]

Splitting into words works fine, but I’m having a question about the delimiters.

Where does this first empty string come from in the delimiter array?

Thanks for explanation.

Answer 1

Between start of line /^/ and first occurrance of - there is "First".

So it splits on "First" obtaining an empty string "" and -.