Question

I’d like to split a string that has a certain repeating pattern, for example:

$string = "GGGGG-SOMETHING-ELSE-GGG-LAST";

to

@array=(-SOMETHING-ELSE-,-LAST);

my attempt so far as a perl newbie

split(/G{2,}/,$string);

Unfortunately this results in only patterns of GG being split on- not the greedy GGGGG or GGG patterns that I has hoped for resulting in 2 array elements.

Answer 1

No, this seems to (mostly) work as intended. The following code:

use strict;
use warnings;

$_="GGGGG-SOMETHING-ELSE-GGG-LAST";
my @a=split(/G{2,}/,$_);
print join(",",@a) . "\n";

produces the output:

,-SOMETHING-ELSE-,-LAST

The issue is that there’s a first element that’s the empty string. So, to fix that, you can do something like:

use strict;
use warnings;

$_="GGGGG-SOMETHING-ELSE-GGG-LAST";
my @a=grep{$_ ne ""}(split(/G{2,}/,$_));
print join(",",@a) . "\n";

And this produces what you want:

-SOMETHING-ELSE-,-LAST