I apologize in advance, this is probably a very stupid question with an obvious solution which is escaping the eye of a rather beginner in perl, or it may also have been in Stackoverflow as a solved question, but my lack of knowledge about what exactly to look for is preventing me from actually finding the answer.
I have a string like:
$s = FOO: < single blankspace> BAR <some whitespace character> some more text with whitespace that can span over multiple lines, i.e. has \n in them ;
#please excuse the lack of quotes, and large text describing the character in angular brackets, but in this example, but I have the string correctly defined, and in plase of <blankspace> I have the actual ASCII 32 character etc.
Now I want to split the $s, in this way:
($instType, $inst, $trailing) = split(/\s*/, $s, 3);
#please note that i do not use the my keyword as it is not in a subroutine
#but i tested with my, it does not change the behavior
I would expect, that $instType takes the value FOO: , without any surrounding space, in the actual test string there is a colon, and I believe, to the best of my knowledge, that it will remain in the $instType. Then it is rather obvious to expect that $inst takes similary the value BAR , without any surrounding spaces, and then finally one may also lean on $trail to take the rest of the string.
However, I am getting: $instType takes F , that is just the single char, $inst takes O, the single charater in the 2nd position in the string $trail takes O: BAR and the rest.
How do I address the issue?
PS perl is 5.18.0