How can I take ONE thing, discard some of it, and end up with MANY things all of the same type as the original? Surely that doesn't make sense does it?
I could take a packet of half a dozen rolls from the supermarket, made (as they often are in the UK) as a single piece of bread with narrow "tear" points, and tear into six pieces. A few crumbs to be thrown away - and there you have it. Six things (of type "piece of bread") where the sum total is actually LESS that the one thing ("piece of bread") that I started with.
This action of breaking bread has a parallel in programming. In Perl (split), Python (split) and PHP (explode, split) amongst others, you can take a single string and break it down into a whole list (Perl, Python) / array (PHP) of smaller strings. You'll often want to do this if you have a string that's a line of data read from a file, and you want to break it down into a series of strings each of which is an individual field.
@pieces = split(/\s+/,$line); # Perl
(written 2006-06-22)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
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[970] String duplication - x in Perl, * in Python and Ruby - (2006-12-07)
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[1195] Regular Express Primer - (2007-05-20)
[1517] Python - formatting objects - (2008-01-24)
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[1876] Python Regular Expressions - (2008-11-08)
[2284] Strings as collections in Python - (2009-07-12)
[2406] Pound Sign in Python Program - (2009-09-15)
[2692] Flexible search and replace in Python - (2010-03-25)
[2721] Regular Expressions in Python - (2010-04-14)
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[3468] Python string formatting - the move from % to str.format - (2011-10-08)
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[4360] Python - comparison of old and new string formatters - (2014-12-22)
[4593] Command line parameter handling in Python via the argparse module - (2015-12-08)
[4595] Python formatting update - including named completions - (2015-12-10)
[4659] Prining a pound sign from Python AND running from the command line at the same time - (2016-03-03)
P208 - Perl - Lists [28] Perl for breakfast - (2004-08-25)
[140] Comparison Chart for Perl programmers - list functions - (2004-12-04)
[230] Course sizes - beware of marketing statistics - (2005-02-27)
[240] Conventional restraints removed - (2005-03-09)
[355] Context in Perl - (2005-06-22)
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[762] Huge data files - what happened earlier? - (2006-06-15)
[928] C++ and Perl - why did they do it THAT way? - (2006-11-16)
[968] Perl - a list or a hash? - (2006-12-06)
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[1316] Filtering and altering Perl lists with grep and map - (2007-08-23)
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[1828] Perl - map to process every member of a list (array) - (2008-10-09)
[1917] Out of memory during array extend - Perl - (2008-12-02)
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[832] Displaying data at 5 items per line on a web page - (2006-08-14)
[1116] PHP adding arrays / summing arrays - (2007-03-23)
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[1451] More PHP sample and demonstration programs - (2007-12-01)
[1614] When an array is not an array - (2008-04-17)
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[2920] Sorting - naturally, or into a different order - (2010-08-14)
[3004] Increment operators for counting - Perl, PHP, C and others - (2010-10-18)
[3379] Sorting data the way YOU want it sorted - (2011-08-05)
[3534] Learning to program in PHP - Regular Expression and Associative Array examples - (2011-12-01)
[4068] Arrays in PHP - contain different and even mixed data types - (2013-04-24)
[4072] Splitting the difference with PHP - (2013-04-27)
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