how to prevent split from removing empty elements

Question

I see that perl removes all the empty elements when i split a string. Is this the expected behavior? I feel this should be left to the programmer to deal with empty fields

> perl -e '@fields = split(/,/, "a,,"); print "$#fields\n";'
0
> perl -e '@fields = split(/,/, "a,b,c"); print "$#fields\n";'
2

Is there a way to prevent this?

Answer 1

Split with a negative limit will preserve trailing empty fields.

@fields = split(/,/, "a,,", -1);