Meaning of 2nd parameter in StringOps.split(String, Int)

Question

I was trying to split a string and keep the empty strings. Fortunately i found a promising solution which gave me my expected results as following REPL session depicts:

scala> val test = ";;".split(";",-1)
test: Array[String] = Array("", "", "")

I was curious what the second parameter actually does and dived into the scala documentation but found nothing except this:

Also inside the REPL interpreter i only get the following information:

scala> "asdf".split

TAB

def split(String): Array[String]        
def split(String, Int): Array[String]

Question Does anybody have an alternate source of documentation for such badly documented parameters? Or can someone explain what this 2dn parameter does on this specific function?

Answer 1

This is the same split from java.lang.String, which as it so happens, has better documentation:

The limit parameter controls the number of times the pattern is applied and therefore affects the length of the resulting array. If the limit n is greater than zero then the pattern will be applied at most n - 1 times, the array's length will be no greater than n, and the array's last entry will contain all input beyond the last matched delimiter. If n is non-positive then the pattern will be applied as many times as possible and the array can have any length. If n is zero then the pattern will be applied as many times as possible, the array can have any length, and trailing empty strings will be discarded.