string split problem

[Gangreen]

Hi, I'm new to Perl but I have some experience in other languages.
Anyway I need to split a string on the character "|".

let's say our string is "one|two|th ree"

when I try the following code:

[CODE=perl] @fields = split('|' , $line); [/CODE]

My line gets splitted into serperated letters instead of one two and three. Same when I replace '|' with /|/

when I replace the | with a space in my string, and do thesame in my split-code:
[CODE=perl]
$line = "one two three";
@fields = split(' ' , $line);[/CODE]

the split does what I expect.
the elements of the array are:

$fields[0] : one
$fields[1] : two
$fields[2] : three

So..I'm confused why it works with a space, and not with '|'.. I need to get it to work with '|' ..Can anyone help me?

[eWish]

Welcome to TSDN!!

[CODE=perl]my @array();
my $string = 'one|two|three' ;
push @array, split(/\|/, $string);

print join"\n", @array;[/CODE]

[Gangreen]

Ah it's an escape character?
Thank you!

[KevinADC]

The pipe '|' is a special character in a regexp, it means "or". If you want to split on a literal pipe you have to escape it like Kevin shows in his code above. There are many speaical characters used in regular expressions, some reading material if you are interested:

Beginning Perl
Pattern Matching and Regular Expressions

[Gangreen]

The pipe '|' is a special character in a regexp, it means "or". If you want to split on a literal pipe you have to escape it like Kevin shows in his code above. There are many speaical characters used in regular expressions, some reading material if you are interested:

Beginning Perl
Pattern Matching and Regular Expressions

I have some books about it, and I'm studying, thanks anyway ;)