Splitting into empty substrings

Question

I get this result (notice that the first "" is for the preceding empty match):

"babab".split("b")
# => ["", "a", "a"]

By replacing "a" with an empty string in the input above as follows,

"bbb".split("b")

I expected to get the following result:

["", "", ""]

But in reality, I get:

[]

What is the logic behind this?

Answer 1

Logic is described in the documentation:

If the limit parameter is omitted, trailing null fields are suppressed.

Trailing empty fields are removed, but not leading ones.

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If, by any chance, what you were asking is "yeah, but where's the logic in that?", then imagine we're parsing some CSV.

fname,sname,id,email,status
,,1,[email protected],

We want the first two position to remain empty (rather than be removed and have fname become 1 and sname - [email protected]).

We care less about trailing empty fields. Removed or kept, they don't shift data.