split(3tcl)

💖 split(3tcl) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to split from the Tcl Built-In Commands squad 🫶 she's a tiny little icon and she does exactly one thing but she does it so well.

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✨ NAME ✨

split — split a string into a proper Tcl list 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

split string ?splitChars?

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the vibe: split hands you back a list, and that list was made by chopping up string at every single character that shows up in the splitChars argument 🔥

every element of that result list? it's just the characters from string that were chillin' between the instances of the characters in splitChars. that's it, that's the whole job 💅

now, the messy part (iykyk): you will get empty list elements generated when:

• string contains adjacent characters that are in splitChars 😭
• the first character of string is in splitChars 🙈
• the last character of string is in splitChars 💀

and if splitChars is an empty string? then literally every character of string becomes its own separate element of the result list. one char, one slot, main character energy ⭐

splitChars defaults to the standard white-space characters 🌸 (yes it just handles it for you, no cap).

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✨ EXAMPLES ✨

dividing a USENET group name into its hierarchical components 🦋

split "comp.lang.tcl" .
      → comp lang tcl

see how the split command splits on every character in splitChars, which can result in information loss if you are not careful 😭 (this is your warning, bestie, pay attention)

split "alpha beta gamma" "temp"
      → al {ha b} {} {a ga} {} a

extract the list words from a string that is not a well-formed list 🎀

split "Example with {unbalanced brace character"
      → Example with \{unbalanced brace character

split a string into its constituent characters 👑

split "Hello world" {}
      → H e l l o { } w o r l d

🌈 PARSING RECORD-ORIENTED FILES 🌈

parse a Unix /etc/passwd file, which consists of one entry per line, with each line consisting of a colon-separated list of fields 🍓

## Read the file
set fid [open /etc/passwd]
set content [read $fid]
close $fid

## Split into records on newlines
set records [split $content "\n"]

## Iterate over the records
foreach rec $records {

    ## Split into fields on colons
    set fields [split $rec ":"]

    ## Assign fields to variables and print some out...
    lassign $fields \
            userName password uid grp longName homeDir shell
    puts "$longName uses [file tail $shell] for a login shell"
}

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• join(3tcl)
• list(3tcl)
• string(3tcl)

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✨ KEYWORDS ✨

list, split, string 💜

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and that's the whole page, bestie — she lives in the Tcl collection as split(3tcl), so go forth and split responsibly 🧚💖