Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

Split Strings with Trailing Nulls

Ruby's String .split accepts an optional number argument, and this lets us do some interesting things.

For instance, here is a naive full name splitter using such an argument:

> first_name, last_name = 'Benico del Toro'.split(' ', 2)
 => ["Benicio", "del Toro"]

It's naive because it doesn't work on names like 'Philip Seymour Hoffman', returning ["Philip", "Seymour Hoffman"].

Today I learned this argument can be negative. When it is, there is no limit to the number of fields returned, and trailing null fields are not suppressed:

> "Academy Award Winner....".split(".", 2)
 => ["Academy Award Winner", "..."]
> "Academy Award Winner....".split(".", -2)
 => ["Academy Award Winner", "", "", "", ""]

The actual value of the negative number seems to be irrelevant:

> "Academy Award Winner....".split(".", -1)
 => ["Academy Award Winner", "", "", "", ""]
> "Academy Award Winner....".split(".", -12)
 => ["Academy Award Winner", "", "", "", ""]

http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.3.0/String.html#method-i-split

See More #ruby TILs
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